How to understand the attack by Donald Trump and Elon Musk on South Africa?

The reality is quite different to what the performances, reporting and analyses suggest

Last week Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing punitive measures on South Africa and threatening more. This followed statements a few days earlier. It claimed that:

[the] recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 (Act) [will] enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation

this follows countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners

South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.

The United States cannot support the government of South Africa’s commission of rights violations in its country or its ‘undermining United States foreign policy, which poses national security threats to our Nation, our allies, our African partners, and our interests.

In parallel, on Twitter, former South African Elon Musk attacked President Cyril Ramaphosa for either allowing or participating in genocide of white farmers and racist attacks on white people.

All of these claims are either completely false or misguided. The reality is that Ramaphosa, and the ANC for most of the preceding period it was in power, has actually prioritised the interests of wealthy and white South Africans over their own voters, repeatedly. The Expropriation Act is a continuation of that. And the ICJ application was not quite what it seemed.

However, almost all analyses take the situation at face value and in doing so they miss these and other crucial points. In separate posts I will unpack:

1. Where power really lies in South Africa’s ‘Government of National Unity’ [precis: not with the ANC]

2. How to understand the dynamics of Trump’s second term [precis: he’ll say a lot of crazy things but what actually happens will be determined by people around him serving more powerful interests]

For now I will just explain why the standard interpretations of what’s going on are hopelessly flawed.

The United States and South Africa

To understand what is really going on you need to understand the recent history of US-South Africa relations. I provided a (lengthy) timeline here. The crux is that the US has been playing a very savvy ‘soft power’ game in South Africa since Barack Obama’s presidency. That culminated in the 2024 elections - the results of which I have argued were manipulated, with the US likely playing a significant role.

The results were exactly what the recently-departed US ambassador, Reuben Brigety, would have wanted: the ANC lost power, the subsequent coalition is controlled more by the former opposition DA (which largely represents the white minority), the president (Ramaphosa) is compromised because he relies on the DA and indeed the United States itself for protection from prosecution on the PhalaPhala matter, but the ANC holds most cabinet positions and thereby serves as a useful front for the apartheid billionaires and foreign influences that are now pulling the strings directly.¹

As one illustration of how direly compromised South Africa’s democracy is, consider that a few months after the election the CIA cut-out organisation, the National Endowment for Democracy, hosted a ‘democracy conference’ in Johannesburg. It was attended by many high profile ‘civil society’ organisations and even the country’s largest trade union federation whose leader is a close ally of president Ramaphosa. (NED also funds what is supposed to be the country’s most left-wing newspaper and a supposedly PanAfrican online newsletter…)

However, this strategy of co-opting South African democracy covertly was pursued by Obama and Biden, not Trump. And it is doubtful whether the ‘deep state’ would risk letting Trump in on such nuances: he is a genuinely unpredictable wrecking ball and that’s not the kind of person the intelligence community is going to trust with this kind of information. I explained this months ago in my post about why I believe — completely contrary to all the media coverage and analysis — that the Biden administration actually approved, maybe even prompted!, South Africa’s ICJ application.

Meanwhile, Trump is getting information on South Africa from other sources that usually don’t know anything about the co-option strategy or even if they do, don’t care. They misrepresent the situation with white South Africans as being dire, partly just because it’s a lucrative grift for them and partly because they hope for some (typically unclear and practically unlikely) overt external intervention by the USA.

Trump may very well believe the things he’s claiming, but pivotal individuals know the truth is quite different and therefore will ensure that the actions taken do not correspond to the rhetoric.

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Claim #1 Trump and Musk are responding to Ramaphosa’s signing of the Expropriation Act

In a recent article I explained that the controversies in South Africa around the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Act and the Expropriation Act are completely overblown.

That is deliberate and serves three purposes:

1. It conceals the fact that Ramaphosa is (again) selling out his party’s longstanding political commitments (dating back to the Freedom Charter)

2. It conceals where true power lies in the ‘GNU’ coalition

3. It provides the former opposition, now coalition partners, with a bargaining chip in the performative internal negotiations: ‘we let you get away with this legislation we oppose, now we want something in return’

Even supposedly credible international media outlets like the Associated Press have described the Expropriation Act as “aims to address some of the wrongs of South Africa’s racist apartheid era”. That is simply false.²

The problem with this strategy is that those involved also have to deal with the consequences of their deception… For example, the constituencies of the DA and FF+ are angry that their parties appear to be selling them out to the ANC’s radical leftwing policies. The DA and FF+ leaders in the know (which may only be half-a-dozen people) can’t tell their constituents what’s really going on without blowing the strategy out of the water.

Hence the DA is now making a big song and dance about going to court to block or amend the Expropriation Act. It’s an inexpensive performance to put on for the large gains that will accrue from the deception I’ve described above.

Trump may believe that Ramaphosa is about to take white farmers’ land without compensation, because some of his more untethered and uninformed advisors may be regurgitating falsehoods from white rightwing groups in South Africa. I am not so sure Musk is as stupid as he is pretending to be — but more on that in a later post. Either way, with the USA having achieved the political outcome it wanted from the 2024 election, it would only be shooting its own strategy and interests in the foot by really taking genuinely harmful punitive action against South Africa. So that is very unlikely to happen: those who play the role of determining how the rhetoric translates into action (like Marco Rubio) will ensure that nothing particularly bad happens.

I made this argument in two previous posts [here and here] and, as I will summarise in the conclusion, right now my predictions are right on the money.

Claim #2 Trump is retaliating against South Africa’s ICJ application

Once again, this seems plausible on the face of it. Until you consider that the USA may well have approved South Africa’s ICJ application…

Here’s what I said about this in my last post on that subject:

With Trump’s victory, [South Africa’s strategy in relation to Israel-Palestine] now seems far more risky.

The most obvious reason for that, is that Trump’s outlook for the Middle East and Israel may be very different to what Biden was pursuing. However, my view is that the ‘deep state’ tends to keep politicians to the planned trajectory, one way or another.

Given how much of a wildcard he is, it is unclear whether the US intelligence establishment is likely to fully brief Trump on some of its more subtle operations. If they do not do so on the covert role of the US in South Africa’s ICJ application, there would appear to be a real danger that Trump could support formal retaliation.

Offsetting that concern is that fact that Ramaphosa has already sought to use non-state channels to engage with Trump before his scheduled inauguration. Even before the election Ramaphosa went out of his way, almost to a humiliating degree, to engage with Elon Musk while attending the UN General Assembly.

Whether or not Trump does get fully briefed on recent behind-the-scenes cooperation, and whether or not he continues the trajectory set by the Biden administration, there are three main reasons why I very much doubt any serious, negative measures by the United States against South Africa are forthcoming:

1. The supposed provocations by South Africa either did not happen (as in the case of the Lady R weapons smuggling) or were tacitly supported by the US ‘deep state’ (as in the case of the ICJ application)

2. Ramaphosa has already sought to ingratiate himself to Trump and parts of Trump’s new entourage and the second-largest party in the new coalition (the DA) has been ingratiating itself to the US State and its institutions for years (if not decades)

3. The US may have played an active, if subtle, role in the manipulation of South Africa’s 2024 election to secure the defeat of the ANC and the creation of the new governing coalition: it is in its (the US’s) interests to see a post-ANC government perform better than its predecessors.

So, the good news is that South Africa is unlikely to suffer form any punitive actions by the USA.

The bad news is that this is largely because its sovereignty, and Ramaphosa’s independence, may have been substantially compromised in the last few years.

Conclusion: smoke, mirrors and a lot of hot air

So here’s my summary of the situation: the Expropriation Act provides no improvement for black people who were dispossessed of land during apartheid or colonialism; the ICJ application was likely covertly approved by the USA; the governing coalition in South Africa is actually what the Biden administration wanted and will dance to the tune of US and UK interests without any threats; it is in the USA’s interests [by which I mean the US ‘deep state’s’ interests] that the South African economy does better under the current government than previous ones; consequently any apparent punitive action is either a facade or will be very short-lived.

Already my predictions from last week are being borne out. The ‘sanctions’ Trump has imposed on South Africa are nothing more than a suspension of USAID funding, of which the vast majority has now officially been given a 90-day waiver. I should add that US aid to South Africa is very small compared to the entire national budget: around 0.28%. It would be inconvenient, but not that hard, to replace it. Readers in the Americas will note that nothing like the substantial sanctions imposed on Canada and Mexico have yet been imposed on South Africa.

Just imagining the amount of energy all these actors are now going to put into the necessary performances is mind-numbing. Already the South African media outlets controlled by the same billionaires and aligned to the same foreign interests are manufacturing dramas around delegations to Washington. A popular topic is whether the United States will cancel South Africa’s participation in the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). As a more specific version of my argument above: I doubt this will happen either, because in addition to harming economic performance under the current compromised government, it will also harm US firms and white South African farmers.

One thing that all these actors are likely to do is to use the supposed/alleged threat from Trump as just another basis for pushing policies internally that are against the interests of the vast majority of citizens (of all races, actually). While it is possible the performance of hostility could last Trump’s whole term, it seems more likely that these actors will go to Washington, victoriously announce an agreement (‘but we had to compromise on some things’), and take actions even more harmful to the interests of South Africa and South Africans than they would have anyway.

It’s sad to consider how much societal energy will be wasted — indeed has already been wasted — by citizens engaging with those performances as if they are real. In doing so, they will be distracted from what is actually going on. For example, as I will write about in a future post, I expect that the most likely use of the Expropriation Act will actually be to privatise public land for rent-seeking: the complete opposite of what the current drama appears to suggest.

One major implication of all this: narratives that these developments reflect a ‘declining (US) empire’ are at best simplistic, at worst entirely misplaced. But I will do a dedicated post on that topic.

I hope that my writing can at least help save you some time and misplaced energy… There are too many important, real issues to be distracted by these kinds of manipulative strategies.

[Note: this post was written in some haste as I have a host of deadlines this week, so apologies if there are more typos or errors than usual]

1. Some argue, with good reason, that many of these billionaires (local and foreign) have been pulling the ANC’s strings since democracy began in 1994, but even if that was the case their control has never been as absolute as it is now.

2. A more generous reader might say that the Associated Press could be referring to the rhetoric of the Act rather than the legal realities…