The nation’s government is antagonizing the bulk of its population and currying favor with hostile regimes. Reform would serve its interests as well as America’s.
The nation’s government is antagonizing the bulk of its population and currying favor with hostile regimes. Reform would serve its interests as well as America’s.
P resident Trump recently signed an executive order titled, “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa.” The order held that the South African government is responsible both for domestic rights violations against certain of its citizens as well as foreign policy actions that threaten the national security of the United States.
The outcry of South Africa’s government and much of the international media may mislead neutral observers into thinking that Trump was peddling outrageous fabrications. South Africa’s foreign ministry accused the U.S. of a “campaign of misinformation and propaganda.” A Sunday newspaper called Trump a “bumbling fool.” A group of civil society organizations accused the U.S. of peddling “dangerous lies.” A prominent news site published a cartoon of Trump in Nazi garb.
Ignore the bluster. Trump’s descriptions were well informed and largely accurate, even if we would disagree on some of the emphases.
If you read the responses carefully, you will see that the outrage was occasioned not by the inaccuracy of Trump’s analysis but rather by his attempt to obstruct policies that South Africa’s government and a surprising number of Western observers regard as sacrosanct.
The executive order referenced a newly signed piece of expropriation legislation purportedly drafted to address South Africa’s racially skewed land ownership patterns. The law would, however, allow the state to seize any fixed or movable property, including that of American investors, for less than its market value.
Besides the risk this poses to civil rights, the new law will further stunt investment into South Africa’s economy. Over the past decade, South Africa has averaged a rate of economic growth of around 1 percent. This is largely because the rate of fixed investment to GDP has averaged about half of what the country needs to reach emerging market growth averages of between 4 percent and 5 percent. A consequence of this anemic growth is an unemployment rate that South Africa’s official statistical agency records at over 30 percent, which mostly hurts the country’s black majority.
In terms of land ownership, South Africa’s approximately 40,000 commercial farms (which are predominantly managed by white South Africans) cover 38 percent of the country’s surface area. At least 60 percent of this is grazing land in the arid western reaches of the country. Along the fertile eastern reaches, more than half of land (when measured by its productive value) is effectively possessed by black South Africans.
However, this land is not formally owned by them because the South African state does not allow many black South Africans individual title to the land they occupy, preferring instead that land be held by the state or communally under the control of unelected tribal leaders given its long running ideological aversion to private property rights. An effective means to address skewed land ownership patterns would therefore be to grant black South Africans title over property they already occupy. That South Africa’s government opposes granting such titles is an abuse as egregious as any other cited by Trump. His EO therefore gets it wrong insofar as its emphases suggest that white South Africans are unique in suffering abuses under their government.
At odds with such “black versus white” analyses that continue to dominate Western thinking about the country, polls produced by South Africa’s Social Research Foundation (SRF), of which I am chairman, show that South Africans of all races share considerable common ground in their opinions on the trajectory of the country. They also largely agree on what needs to be done to correct course.
These opinions are often what Western observers would regard as “conservative,” such as that job creation should be a policy priority over wealth redistribution, that tax rates should be reduced, and that government hiring practices should prioritize merit over race. These opinions align considerably with the sentiments of Trump’s executive order. At the time of the recent U.S. elections, the SRF polled how South Africans might have voted. It found support for Trump was marginally stronger amongst black than amongst white South Africans.
Trump’s allegation that the South African government discriminates against the white minority is a matter of fact. That government pursues policies that require employers and investors to meet racial employment and ownership targets to participate in the economy. These policies are often buttressed via racial nationalist invective directed at shielding those policies from scrutiny. For years, the rules have been hijacked by a politically connected elite, driving staggering levels of corruption and doing great damage to South Africa’s economic performance. They have also driven many of South Africa’s skilled professionals out of the country.
Trump’s emphasis on discrimination against the white minority cannot be divorced from his historical comments that commercial farmers are singled out for violent attack by criminal bands. Whilst the mainstream media have stated this to be false, those farmers, white as well as black (the number of black commercial producers has slowly increased), are six times more likely to be attacked in their homes than the average rate of similar attack for the broader population — a reality that again defies traditional “black versus white” South African analyses.
At odds with its carefully cultivated image of pursuing a human rights–based foreign policy, South Africa has, since its inception as a democracy, pursued a foreign policy that lent its anti-apartheid credibility to some of the world’s most appalling dictators to bolster their image on global fora. Beneficiaries have included the Suharto regime in Indonesia, Sani Abacha in Nigeria, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Moammar Qaddafi in Libya. In each case, inducements passed hands between the regime in question and senior South African political leaders.
Trump’s specific allegation that “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” is true and is consistent with this record. This is also behavior that allies South Africa’s government with the Iranian regime, whose proxy forces in Africa have left a blood-soaked tide of torture, maiming, church-burning, and beheadings of Africa’s black Christians in its wake.
Trump’s analysis of South Africa is therefore broadly correct. The advice he offers the South African government would, if followed, shore up civil rights in the country whilst boosting the country’s economic performance to improve the living standards of the great majority of its citizens — black as well as white.