The culmination of the political Establishment and media at President Trump’s critical concern for the plight of white South African farmers and the Ramaphosa government’s decision to expropriate land without compensation is not surprising.
No amount of anti-Trump hysteria can divert attention from the basic facts of the situation:
- Over 1,600 white farmers have been murdered since Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1994. Such a situation is unprecedented in a peacetime dispensation and an appalling tragedy;
- The uncertainty and negative speculation around the issue of land reform in South Africa s entirely the fault of the ANC as a result of its failure to address the issue constitutionally over the past 24 years.
For the ANC the chickens have come home to roost. Before 1994, the ANC never lost an opportunity to run to the UN and the US government to protest the apartheid government.
Yet now that it is being exposed for its inability to control crime and for imposing banana republic tactics, the ANC cries foul play. When it suited the ANC, it promoted US interference in South Africa. Now the ANC must swallow the same medicine.
The most critical aspect of this whole sorry saga is that the future stability and viability of South Africa is actually premised on the security of its minorities. By demonising and marginalising white, Indian and mixed-race minorities and accusing them of stealing the land, the lot of the majority will not be improved. The history of post-colonial Africa shows that wherever minorities were marginalised and persecuted, the economic well-being of those countries declined. Nowhere has that been more tragically illustrated than in Zimbabwe.
By attempting to define the future through the lens of failed, populist ideology, namely land seizure, the Ramaphosa government risks destroying South Africa. The reality is that the welfare of the majority depends on the security of the minorities. The Trump Administration is to be commended for being the first in the US since 1994 to take a critical line against the failings of black rule in South Africa.
Sent into The Washington Times and published, 26 August 2018.
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