Trump to Cut Off Funding to South Africa Over Land Confiscation Law

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – US President Donald Trump has announced he is suspending all US funding to black-majority South Africa over the country’s recent implementation of Expropriation Act 13 of 2024, a bill that allows the government to confiscate privately owned land for a public purpose or in the public interest.

“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY, ump said in a post on his Truth Social social media site on Sunday. The United States won’t stand for it, we will act. I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”

Although South Africa’s infamously harsh white supremacist regime of Apartheid was brought down in 1994, a 2017 government report shows that 72% of the country’s land remained white Afrikaner-owned, despite Afrikaner people making up only 7.3% of the population. There has long been an outcry over the need for land reform to address past injustices of racial segregation and the Expropriation Act 13 apparently seeks to answer that call.

Following a parliamentary process that began in 2020, Expropriation Act 13 repeals the apartheid-era Expropriation Act 63 of 1975 and aims to align expropriation law with South Africa’s Constitution. The act says that property must not be expropriated arbitrarily or for a purpose other than a public purpose or in the public interest, for instance, to build roads, schools, and hospitals, or to further the government’s commitment to land reform.

The new law allows for expropriation without compensation if it is “just and equitable and in the public interest” to do so, for example, if the property is not being used.

The legislation will have a severe impact on property rights, with some analysts arguing it is unconstitutional and others assessing it is racist against white people. In a post on his own social media site, X, white South African and top Trump advisor Elon Musk demanded to know from South African president Cyril Ramaphosa: “Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?”

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