Militant right-wing South African organisation Afriforum formed to defend the interests of Afrikaners has justified its actions of lobbying the United States to punish its own government, saying it feared the country will be turned into another Zimbabwe through land expropriation without compensation.
President Cyril Ramaphosa signed South Africa’s controversial Expropriation Bill into law in January, replacing the apartheid-era Act and creating a new framework for land expropriation for public interest purposes, aiming to advance land reform, address historical disparities, and ensure equitable access, though it includes provisions for “just and equitable compensation” and requires negotiations before seizure.
This is why Afriforum is inviting the US to sanction South Africa and its leaders. Washington and Pretoria are currently locked in a vicious diplomatic fight over several contentious issues.
Afriforum is driven by Afrikaner nationalism, a political and cultural ideology that emerged among Afrikaners (descendants of mainly Dutch settlers in South Africa) to foster a distinct cultural identity, language (Afrikaans), and nationhood.
Reacting to scathing attacks by the coalition governing partner ANC, saying Afriforum is a racist and unpatriotic organisation acting in collusion with the US to protect its narrow interests, while hurting South Africa, the controversial white Afrikaner outfit said it feared South Africa could be turned into a Zimbabwe through land seizures without compensation.
This is a reference to Zimbabwe’s violent and chaotic land reform programme under the late former president Robert Mugabe which destroyed the economy.
This comes amid a new diplomatic fight between Washington and Pretoria over the arrest and deportation of seven Kenyans working for a US agency processing some Afrikaners’ refugee status in the US.
US President Donald Trump has given Afrikaners a refugee status on the basis of a false white genocide claim in South Africa which Washington is now pushing for taking Israel to International Criminal Court of Justice in October last year on a charge of genocide in Gaza and passing a law to expropriate land for state utility without compensation.
The US is the biggest international protector of Israel for geopolitical and ethnic reasons.
Trump is close to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man of South African descent who speaks the same language as Afriforum; false claims of genocide.
Responding to ANC accusations that his group is a racist and unpatriotic organisation driven by narrow white privilege interests, Afriforum chief executive Kallie Kriel said:
“The ANC leadership’s attempts in this media statement to personally intimidate me through outright lies and to impose my personal safety in the process exposes the ANC as a party that is increasingly undermining democratic principles and basic human rights.
Unfortunately there are also some in the media, like Pieter du Toit and Adrian Basson of http://News24.com who actively participate in the ANC’s intimidation efforts.
However, this intimidation will not force me and AfriForum to silence. On the contrary, it motivates us to fight even harder, for the sake of everyone in the country, for the protection of human rights.
The fight for human rights and for the country inevitably includes opposition to the ANC’s corruption, misadministration and its efforts to transform South Africa into the next Zimbabwe through deprivation without compensation.
It would be disloyal to the country not to fight to refute the kind of misery Zimbabweans are subjected to in South Africa.
AfriForum will also continue to oppose, among other things, the BELA law, which threatens African schools and consequently African cultural communities’ survival. Further, we will not rest as long as President Ramaphosa and other ANC leaders refuse to condemn the ‘Kill the Farmer’ call for ethnic violence against Africans unwounded.”
