US President Donald Trump has said he will cut all future funding to South Africa over allegations that it was confiscating land and “treating certain classes of people very badly”.
Land ownership has long been a contentious issue in South Africa with most private farmland owned by white people, 30 years after the end of the racist system of apartheid.
There have been continuous calls for the government to address land reform and deal with the past injustices of racial segregation.
“South Africa is a constitutional democracy that is deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice and equality. The South African government has not confiscated any land,” Ramaphosa responded in a statement on X on Monday morning.
Elon Musk, who was born and grew up in South Africa and is now a Trump adviser, has also joined in the debate.
“Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?” Mr Musk said to Ramaphosa in a post on X.
On Sunday, Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social: “I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”
He later said, in a briefing with journalists, that South Africa’s “leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things”.
“So that’s under investigation right now. We’ll make a determination, and until such time as we find out what South Africa is doing — they’re taking away land and confiscating land, and actually they’re doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.”
Ramaphosa said that the only funding South Africa received from the US was through the health initiative Pepfar, which represented “17% of South Africa’s HIV/Aids programme”.
The US allocated about $440m (£358m) in assistance to South Africa in 2023, according to US government data.
The South African president stressed the government had not confiscated any land.
The new law was 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”, Ramaphosa said.
The new law allows for expropriation without compensation only in circumstances where it is “just and equitable and in the public interest” to do so.
This includes if the property is not being used and there’s no intention to either develop or make money from it or when it poses a risk to people.
Until now, the land had only allowed the government to buy land from its current owners under the principle of “willing seller, willing buyer”, which some feel has delayed the process of land reform.
However, some critics have expressed fears that the law may have disastrous consequences like in Zimbabwe, where land seizures wrecked the economy and scared away investors.
Trump also hit out at South Africa during his first term as US president, asking the-then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study the country’s “farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers”.
At that time, South Africa accused Trump of seeking to sow division, with a spokesperson saying he was “misinformed”.
