President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday, confirming his earlier announcement to freeze U.S. assistance to South Africa due to a new law that aims to rectify injustices from the apartheid era. The White House contends that this law discriminates against the country’s white minority.
“As long as South Africa continues to support questionable actors internationally and permits violent assaults on vulnerable minority farmers, the United States will cease aid to the nation,” the White House stated in a summary of the order. Trump is also planning to introduce a program to resettle white South African farmers and their families as refugees.
This move comes in response to South Africa’s recently enacted Expropriation Act, which grants the government authority to seize land under certain circumstances. The White House claims this law “openly discriminates against the ethnic minority Afrikaners.”
Signed into law by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last month, the Expropriation Act allows land to be taken in cases where it is underutilized or when redistribution serves the public interest. The law seeks to address historical injustices from the apartheid era, during which Black South Africans had their land forcibly taken and were relocated to designated non-white areas.
Elon Musk, a close ally of Trump and head of the newly established Department of Government Efficiency, has raised concerns about the law in recent social media posts, framing it as a threat to South Africa’s white minority.
The executive order also mentions South Africa’s involvement in filing genocide accusations against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
This suspension of foreign aid to South Africa aligns with a broader trend of halting most U.S. overseas assistance under Trump, as he pivots toward an “America First” foreign policy.
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