South Africa

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday formalizing his announcement earlier this week that he’ll freeze assistance to South Africa for a law aiming to address some of the wrongs of South Africa’s racist apartheid era — a law the White House says amounts to discrimination against the country’s white minority.

“As long as South Africa continues to support bad actors on the world stage and allows violent attacks on innocent disfavored minority farmers, the United States will stop aid and assistance to the country,” the White House said in a summary of the order.

The ANC’s policy of trapping and starving ‘illegal’ miners betrays a contempt for human life.

This I began writing two weeks ago as an overnight guest in a cosy cabin on a farm beside an endless dirt road in the most remote part of the north-western Cape Province in the country of my birth, South Africa. To many eyes this might seem a landscape of utter desolation: hot, dry and windswept scrubland plateau, flat as far as the eye can see but cut by deep, rocky canyons tight with the most intense and diverse profusion of succulents on the planet: flowering aloes, spiky aloes, furry aloes, ground-creeping aloes and the strange giant palm-like aloe, the Quiver Tree.

Seizing white-owned farms and nationalising all mines are among the demands of minority parties jostling for position in an unprecedented coalition after South Africa’s elections.

Frantic coalition talks began on Monday after the ruling African National Congress lost its majority in a humbling election.

Two of the political parties vying for power – former president Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe party (MK), and the Leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) led by Julius Malema – have staked out radical demands in return for seats in a coalition government.

The African National Congress, which came to power in 1994 after the end of Apartheid in South Africa, lost its parliamentary for the first time, partial results from the general election showed on Saturday.

With 99% of the votes from Wednesday’s election counted, the party, once led by Nelson Mandela, secured just over 40%, a far cry from the 57.5% it won in 2019.

The party also lost its majority in two of the nine provinces, while the opposition pro-business Democratic Alliance (DA) retained control of a third.

They view the ANC as an elite project

In 2021, at the age of 24, Chad Louw became South Africa’s youngest ever mayor. Then a member of the governing African National Congress party (ANC), Louw was elected in Oudtshoorn, a town in the Klein Karoo region of the Western Cape. This is a sparse, dusty world of open expanses, straight highways and dramatic mountain ranges. In the early 20th century, it supplied a global fashion for ostrich feathers, a boom period that endowed Oudtshoorn with a crop of stately colonial mansions known locally as ostrich palaces. Today, these buildings give the town a quaint character that sits uneasily amid the signs of poverty and unemployment.

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They were shadow people, moving beyond the light of small fires on a winter dawn. There was no hint then that I was about to encounter one of the most extraordinary sights of my time in South Africa.

In this part of the country, winter is a cold, dry season that burns the veld brown. The ground is hard like flint and when the wind blows across the plains, dust covers the squatters and all that they carry.

I could hear digging, and coming closer I saw a woman hacking at the earth. Nearby other men and women were doing the same thing. They had old garden tools, machetes, pieces of stone, anything to make holes into which they placed pieces of plastic, tin and wood.

I asked the woman what she was doing. “We are hiding our shacks,” she told me.

Brace yourselves. Absolutely disgusting. pic.twitter.com/M1rwrZpMji

— Mufasa007 (@Mufasa0062) March 4, 2024

From the outside, Johannesburg does not look like it is doing well.

Roads littered with potholes. Broken traffic lights not repaired for months. Rotting rubbish in the streets.

But from the inside, the scale of the problems facing the biggest city in South Africa and the richest and most industrialised in the continent is even worse.

From taps regularly running dry to daily four-hour power cuts – known locally as load shedding – life for many people in Jo’burg has declined dramatically.

The WHITE ghettos that blight South Africa

Addressing South Africa’s parliament this month, President Ramaphosa tried to describe the progress made by his party, the African National Congress, through the experience of a fictitious young black woman born 30 years ago, as the country moved from apartheid to democracy.

That woman, he told sceptical MPs, had lived a life her parents could only have dreamt about. She would have received a child support grant, free healthcare, lived in a house built by the state, with free water and electricity. College education was also free, and the government’s affirmative action policies ensured she landed a well-paying job, or even started her own business.

But what the president was saying, as the opposition was quick to point out, was a figment of his imagination.