South Africa’s Collision Course with Trump: Predictable and Avoidable

‘So, Blair keep your England, and let me keep my Zimbabwe’, said Robert Mugabe in September 2002. ‘Let our Africans come first in the development of Africa. Not as puppets, not as beggars but as a sovereign people’.

The Zimbabwean leader was responding to British criticism over the land invasions that dispossessed white farmers in favour, mostly, of political lackeys of the ruling ZANU-PF. ‘We shall not deprive the white farmers of land completely. Every one of them is entitled to at least one farm’, he told the World Conference on Sustainable Development. ‘But they would want to continue to have more than one farm. 15, 20, 35 farms, one person. We don't mind having and bearing sanctions banning us from Europe’. 

And so Zimbabwe’s implosion hastened, its economy shedding value as the politics of land distribution propped up Mugabe’s power.   

After taking the reigns in South Africa in 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa took a swipe at US President Donald Trump, who had questioned the ruling African National Congress’ (ANC) plans to expropriate land without compensation.

‘South Africa is our land’, said the South African president. ‘South Africa belongs to all the people who live here in South Africa. It does not belong to Donald Trump. He can keep his America … When I meet him I will tell him. I will say you, Donald Trump, you are even worse because your forebears came to America, they found the native, the indigenous Americans, they wiped them out, they killed nearly all of them …  So Donald Trump must leave us alone’, he said.

During his first term in office, which ended in May 2024, Ramaphosa drove an effort to have the South African constitution amended to explicitly allow for the expropriation of land without compensation. When this failed as he and the populist Economic Freedom Fighters disagreed on whether expropriated  land should be owned by the state or by individuals, a law was nonetheless passed by Parliament allowing for ‘nil’ compensation. This was signed into law by Ramaphosa in January 2025, despite the protestations of some of his partners in South Africa’s Government of National Unity (GNU), the ruling coalition since the ANC lost its majority in the May 2024 election.

Wholesale seizure of land without compensation is unlikely to succeed given the constitutional protection afforded to property rights, but landowners have been concerned and have opposed this legislation.

The fear that at some future point, the ‘nil’ compensation law will lead to land seizures, together with the ANC’s vast number of regulations making it impossible to do business without an ‘empowerment partner’ – usually a party grandee – led Trump to state in early February that ‘terrible things, horrible things’ were happening in South Africa and that there would be consequences.

South Africa’s geopolitical stance has also irked leading democracies. Ramaphosa has steadily moved South Africa into the orbit of Russia, China and Iran, a curious vector for a democratic country. Shortly after Hamas massacred Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, his then foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, took a call from the Hamas leadership and visited the Iranian president with a ‘special message’ from Ramaphosa. By the end of the year, South Africa had brought a genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

At his State of the Nation address to South Africa’s Parliament in Cape Town a few days after Trump’s February 2025 threats, Ramaphosa doubled down, saying ‘We will not be bullied’ in obvious reference to Washington’s curtailment of aid to South Africa. He added, towards the end of his sonorous speech, which was high on promises and low on record, ‘South Africa continues to stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine, who, having endured decades of illegal occupation, are now experiencing indescribable suffering. South Africa has acted in accordance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention by instituting proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice’.

This was ill-advised, if indeed he is advised at all – a finger in the eye of a White House intent on redressing what it perceives as foreign policy wrongs and slights. When Canada and Mexico faced wild new tariffs imposed by Trump, they moved to protect their economies and reassure Trump that they were dealing with the issues he had raised. The tariffs were then suspended.

South Africa’s defiance led to Trump acting the day after Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address, signing an executive order titled ‘Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa’, which cut all further aid to South Africa and offered to resettle dispossessed Afrikaners.

It’s going to be a long road back for Ramaphosa in his country’s relationship with the world’s largest economy. 

Washington’s moves have been greeted in South Africa with a contrasting combination of left-wing shock and dismay that donors could actually call a country’s bluff, and reactionary glee that it has happened. For all of the focus on Trump, this is a predictable, avoidable and costly collision, which has been a long time in the making by South Africa. 

Hopefully, it offers an opportunity for South Africa’s sober minds to course correct away from the trajectory followed by Zimbabwe, the country to its immediate north, which provides a saluatory reminder of the costs of getting things wrong. For all of South Africa’s differences with Zimbabwe (including its economic size and sophistication, and a former white regime more amenable to sharing than its stubbornly racist Rhodesian counterpart), there are similarities – principally in the style of noxious and corrupt governance adopted by the elite, which appears intent on gorging at the country’s cost and is either oblivious to the needs of the people or incapable of doing much about them. And there are more recent parallels, including the question of how to keep a coalition government intact and focused rather than using it as a means to soften the fall of the liberation movement from power, something that Zimbabwe was unable to do to its cost. 

Ramaphosa has just made his job of South African reform and economic recovery a whole lot harder. 

The ANC – which deliberately sought to remain in charge of foreign policy in the GNU – faces two possible but vastly different responses to Trump. It can soften its approach, which is unlikely, not least since the liberation movement fundamentally lacks humility and thinks of itself as at least the US’s equal. Such moves, if it was to choose rapprochement, could include backtracking on the ICJ case, replacing South Africa’s ambassador to Washington who has been linked now to radicalism, and an overall lowering of the anti-US tone. It should do its utmost, of course, to avoid the implementation of US tariffs on South African goods as further punishment, including the possible end of the African Growth and Opportunity Act. 

The methods for achieving this rapprochement could lie in using the good offices of wealthy and influential South African businessmen with contacts in Mar-a-Lago, which could help to reach a compromise around, for example, tidying up the bloated and confusing assemblage of laws and regulations developed in South Africa since 1996 stipulating preferential black ownership over the economy. If Trump’s executive order enables a legislative spring-clean, he would have done all South Africans a service – apart from those, of course, with rentier roles and ambitions. And most would be able to claim a victory. 

Or, the ANC can stubbornly rhetorically harden itself to US pressure. This can only create more pain for South Africa and legitimise anti-ANC sentiment, both domestically and abroad. If this course is adopted, any sanctions against South Africa should be targeted specifically against the ANC leadership rather than the whole economy. 

If the latter route is taken, the cost, as ever, will not be borne by South Africa’s leadership, which will creep from behind high walls in cavalcades to slip and slide its way through international gatherings mouthing aspirations without substance, but by people, from the Congo to the Cape.

© Greg Mills and Ray Hartley, 2025, published by RUSI with permission of the authors

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