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South Africa should prevent the US from accessing its minerals if Washington withdraws funding to the nation over its land expropriation policies, its mining minister said on Monday.
US President Donald Trump, in a social media post hours earlier, accused South Africa of “confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.” Trump added: “I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”
South Africa passed a law last month allowing land to be seized without compensation if deemed to be in the public interest. It is an attempt to resolve restitution issues related to Black farmers being forcibly removed from their land during the apartheid era.
“If [the US] don’t give us money, let’s not give them minerals,” Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe said at this year’s Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town.
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Land ownership remains a charged issue in South Africa, some 30 years after the end of white minority rule: Some 72% of private land is owned by white people who make up around 7% of the population, according to a 2017 land audit by the government.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, writing on X, said his government looked forward to engaging with the Trump administration over Pretoria’s land reform policy and bilateral issues to “share a better and common understanding over these matters.” He also said Washington “remains a key strategic political and trade partner for South Africa.”
Billionaire Elon Musk, a key Trump ally who was raised in South Africa and heads the newly created Department of Government Efficiency that advises the US president, criticized Ramaphosa in a post on the X platform that he owns. He wrote: “Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?”
Alexis’s view
The response of South Africa’s mining minister to Trump’s funding threat points to a deeper issue among African policymakers: How best to leverage the importance of the continent’s mineral wealth? Here at Mining Indaba, Mantashe’s combative response to Trump was greeted by a collective gasp followed by applause. “We have minerals in the continent, and therefore we have something. We’re not just beggars,” he told delegates, adding that Africans must use mineral wealth “to our advantage.”
His comments tie in with a broader push among African policymakers to add more value by processing minerals locally and renegotiating contracts. Growing frustration over access to valuable minerals is driving disputes between Sahelian countries and mining companies. Senegal’s President Bassirou Diomaye Faye has also made reviewing contracts over access to resources a key part of his policy framework.
Trump’s sudden intervention in a contentious domestic issue has also exposed divisions within South Africa’s coalition government. The Democratic Alliance (DA), a traditional rival of the African National Congress that has become a coalition partner of the former liberation party, was opposed to the expropriation legislation.
DA leader John Steenhuisen, who serves as agriculture minister, criticized Mantashe’s comments in a text to my colleague Sam Mkokeli. “I don’t think those comments are helpful and will inflame an already difficult situation,” he wrote. “We should be seeking to cement relations with our largest trading partners, not blow them up.”
The controversy will add to concerns held by some South African politicians and business leaders who were already fearful that the country’s deepening ties with China and Russia could prompt a backlash in the Trump 2.0 era.
The View From A SOUTH AFRICAN BUSINESS GROUP
“We have the practical ability to restrict exports of our minerals, but there will be unintended consequences for doing so,” Martin Kingston, who chairs the Business For South Africa lobby group, told Semafor. “Entering into a tariff war is not helpful, nobody wins.”
Kingston said South Africa already had a funding headache following the suspension of US aid for the country’s anti-HIV and AIDS programs, as announced last week. “We’ve got charities and non-government organizations, who rely solely on US aid — they have no alternative sources of funding,” said Kingston. “We must move very quickly to look for substitute resources, either from our government, internationally or domestically.”
Notable
- South Africa’s land reallocation project is critical for the country’s push for racial reconciliation, political scientist Michael Albertus recently wrote in Foreign Policy.