8 February 2025
The cutting of US aid to South Africa has already resulted in vital health services, such as the Ivan Toms Centre for Health in Cape Town, pausing services. Photo of Donald Trump: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)
United States President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Friday stopping aid to South Africa. The only substantial aid we get from the US is health funding, including 17% of our HIV programme.
The order is based on a misleading characterisation of the political situation in South Africa. It states that the recently enacted Expropriation Act enables the government to “seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” and that this act 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”.
Trump also cites the case against Israel at the Hague as a reason for the order. He shows no respect for institutions of global law that the United States helped establish, such as the International Court of Justice, on which an American appointed judge sits. South Africa, like any member country, is entitled to lodge complaints against other countries with this court. Its complaint against Israel is supported by many others including robust liberal democracies like Ireland. It is the court that will decide if Israel has committed genocide. In any case, trying to use international institutions to stop mass murder is admirable.
Trump also gives South Africa’s close relations with Iran as another reason for the order. Yet Trump cosies up to the leader of Saudi Arabia, a country whose government is arguably as theocratic and nasty as Iran’s.
Trump orders the United States not to “provide aid or assistance to South Africa”. This appears to halt the hundreds of millions of dollars annually in PEPFAR money that provides life-saving services to extremely vulnerable people in South Africa with HIV and TB or at especially high risk of contracting these diseases. Those who stand to be most harmed are people who have almost no influence over South Africa’s laws or foreign policy. Thousands of jobs are also likely to be lost.
The order does appear to have some leeway. It states that the head of each US agency “may permit the provision of any such foreign aid or assistance that, in the discretion of the relevant agency head, is necessary or appropriate”. What this means is unclear. But the chaos created by the gutting of USAID and other edicts from the US government over the past few weeks have meant that health programmes like Ivan Toms Centre for Health and the Wits RHI projects have paused providing services. Organisations dependent on US government money are preparing to retrench employees. USAID staff in South Africa have been placed on leave and ordered to return to the US (apparently temporarily stopped by a court order). Some clinical trials have been forced to stop, which is almost certainly a violation of the ethics governing research on humans.
Creating projects and institutions that save lives is hard work. It takes years to make these projects robust and effective. Apparently destroying them at a whim, based on false characterisations, merely takes a few weeks.
There will be much hardship ahead. South Africa more than 30 years after the collapse of apartheid should not be in a position where we are dependent on foreign aid. On the contrary we should be offering more aid to other African countries. Sadly, corruption and mismanagement, as well as a stagnant economy, mean our government is unable to pay for a chunk of vital life-saving health services. More than ever we need leadership that takes a hard stand against corruption. We may need to seek foreign aid elsewhere to fill the gaps left by PEPFAR, but this should be seen as temporary.
An especially bizarre part of Trump’s order is this: “[T]he United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
Most Afrikaners, at least white ones, are doing well in South Africa. Many disagree with the government’s BEE policies. The argument in favour of these policies is that they help redress the historical discrimination inflicted upon black people, primarily by white Afrikaners. Groups like Afriforum disagree and argue that BEE contradicts the principle of ending racial discrimination.
Many also argue that BEE has been used to enable corruption and mismanagement in the civil service, and that it creates an absurd amount of red tape for businesses providing services to government. I agree with this criticism of BEE.
But no honest argument can be made that Afrikaners as a group are suffering because of “government-sponsored race-based discrimination”. Moreover our constitutional democracy provides enormous opportunity for everyone to debate these policies, protest against them, lobby for change and use the courts to prevent abuses. Unlike Afriforum, AgriSA has condemned Trump’s moves. Although AgriSA takes issue with the Expropriation Act, it has committed to testing its constitutionality in court instead of lobbying the American government to punish our country.
It is ridiculous to offer Afrikaners refugee status in the United States. (One wonders if the offer applies to the several million black Afrikaans-first-language speakers? How will the US decide who is an Afrikaner? The Pencil Test?) The vast majority of white Afrikaners have made peace with the new South Africa and are thriving. It is unlikely many will be persuaded by this nonsensical offer.
But there is one cause for concern. Some marginal Afrikaner groups, supported by some extremely irresponsible publications, have been stoking white identity politics and conspiracy theories, most infamously that there is a genocide of white farmers — an idea that is about as ridiculous as believing that the moon is made out of cheese. (Of course, as with most people in the country, farmers and farm workers face much too high a risk of violent crime.) South Africa is a land of many identities, ethnicities and ideologies. For over 30 years our post-apartheid country has held together, despite occasionally being on the brink. We must not allow the peddlers of hate to derail our constitutional democracy.
