Trump is wrong on South African land grabs, despite controversy over expropriation law

US President Donald Trump’s assertions in an interview and on his social media platform Truth that the South African government is “confiscating land” has thrust into the spotlight President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent signing of Expropriation Act No 13 of 2024, following a parliamentary process that started in 2020.

“The South African government has not confiscated any land,” Ramaphosa said in reaction. South African-born Elon Musk took to his social media platform X to ask Ramaphosa to agree with Trump’s false statements and to ask why South Africa has “openly racist ownership laws”.

In a less diplomatic response, Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe told the Mining Indaba in Cape Town: “Let’s withhold minerals.”

Trump has also for a second time insisted that Washington would investigate land seizures. The first time was in 2018, during his first term, when he also repeated assertions on social media platform X, then Twitter, that there was a “large-scale killing of farmers”.

AfriForum’s campaign
Trump’s recent assertions come after right-wing, majority white-led civil rights organisation AfriForum said they would lobby for international support after Ramaphosa signed the bill into law last month. The group feels that the new law does not guarantee the protection of property rights, but following Trump’s pronouncements it said Ramaphosa and others in his party, the African National Congress (ANC), should be singled out for sanctions, “not South Africa’s residents”.

AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel said the signing of the Expropriation Act “as well as the enforcement of the country’s existing racial laws, will have serious negative implications for investor confidence in South Africa”. The organisation is also, among others, opposed to Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and affirmative action regulations. The ANC in a statement accused the organisation of having a “racist agenda”.

The Democratic Alliance (DA), formerly the biggest opposition party and now governing in a coalition with the ANC in the Government of National Unity (GNU), objected to Ramaphosa signing the bill into law without informing coalition partners first. The party, which is liberal, business-friendly and has a majority white leadership, has threatened to withdraw from the GNU should this issue recur.

The DA’s objections to the act were largely because the sequencing would make implementation difficult. Public Works Minister Dean Macpherson said this meant two contradictory processes to determine expropriation were contained in one bill.

Trump’s has united the GNU in their opposition to his statement. Macpherson told the Mining Indaba: “I want to be unequivocal: No one in South Africa is having their land confiscated. This is my commitment to the people of South Africa and our partners around the world.”

Party leader and Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen said the DA would work to ensure that the Expropriation Act was constitutional, and the US should reconsider Trump’s threat to cut aid. “The US has been a longstanding and valued partner to South Africa,” Steenhuisen said. The DA has traditionally been closer to the US’s policy positions than the ANC has been.

Why amend the old Expropriation Act?
Land has been a hot topic in political campaigns because of the way black people were disowned from their land in the country’s apartheid past. These inequalities persist. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), founded in 2013, made land redistribution one of the party’s key tenets.

South Africa needed to align its expropriation law of 1975 with the country’s 1996 constitution, and the new act sets out the procedures, rules and regulations for expropriation, Zsa-Zsa Temmers Boggenpoel, a professor of law at the University of Stellenbosch, wrote in The Conversation. Land redistribution and the expropriation of property is also a potential tool to address land inequality and the injustices of South Africa’s apartheid past, she added.

Land expropriation is also necessary for the building of big infrastructure projects, such as roads, railways and hospitals. The most controversial part of the act is the outline of how compensation should be determined, and it’s the first time the law deals directly with the idea of nil compensation, she wrote.

Section 25 of the constitution, which also deals with expropriation, made it possible to reduce compensation, an issue mentioned in some court judgments.

Temmers Boggenpoel points out that the circumstances in which nil compensation can be granted in terms of the new act “are, in fact, very limited”, but the act “lacks guidelines on how … discretion [on the payment of nil compensation] must be exercised”.

Could Trump’s alarmist claims come true?
The act provides for nil compensation when a piece of land is bought “to benefit from appreciation in its market value”, meaning speculation is possibly more risky now.

Gabriel Crouse from the conservative Institute for Race Relations think tank wrote on local news site BusinessLive that this meant that speculation was criminalised. “Buying vacant land to resell at a profit is treated like buying and selling heroin, or illegal weapons. That is flatly unjust,” he wrote.

Crouse and other opponents of expropriation laws have argued that the state already has a lot of unused land that it could redistribute to help address historic injustices.

Experts have pointed out that land grabs similar to what happened in neighbouring Zimbabwe took place outside of the law, and hence these legal amendments could not lead to similar confiscation of land. Thus far the South African government has given no indication that it would act outside of the law to expropriate land.

What’s the official word on this?
Ramaphosa in his statement explained that “South Africa is a constitutional democracy that is deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice and equality.” He says the Expropriation Act “is not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution. South Africa, like the US and other countries, has always had expropriation laws that balance the need for public usage of land and the protection of rights of property owners.”

He said the South African government looked forward to engaging with Trump over its land reform policy and other issues. “The US remains a key strategic political and trade partner for South Africa,” he said.

Ramaphosa also pointed out that the only funding by the US to South Africa is PEPFAR aid, making up 17% of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS programme. South Africa has also benefited from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), up for renewal this year.

South Africa’s agriculture and automotive industries have benefited greatly from duty-free access to US markets over the past 25 years, but its eligibility has been questioned over its close ties with China and Russia – which is not in line with the national interests of the US.

International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola’s office said he hoped the fresh investigations ordered by Trump would show that South Africa’s Expropriation Act was not exceptional, but similar to that of many other countries. Lamola’s spokesperson, Chrispin Phiri, said that Lamola looks forward to engaging US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on this topic.