Not just another BRICS in the wall (Dekleptocracy Report #36)
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (center) with other BRICS leaders in 2023. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT
In this issue, we look at President Donald Trump’s February 7 Executive Order that cuts off American aid to South Africa, including a US$400 million line for combating HIV/AIDS, over a land reform measure that targets Afrikaner-owned land while snubbing South Africa as this year’s host of the G20. We see how lobbying by an Afrikaner group that you probably never heard of began in 2018 and reached a critical mass with Elon Musk’s desire to force the government to waive affirmative action rules in telecoms ownership for his Starlink satellite internet products. The tale is a microcosm of foreign policy in Trump’s second term and the role of the president’s favorites and lobbyists in shaping some of America’s most important relationships.
Correction and update: In our previous newsletter, due to an editing error, we mistakenly identified Scott Greytak. His correct title is Director of Advocacy for Transparency International U.S. Additionally, he pointed out that our assertion that conservatives had “decided as a group that the CTA and its registry must die” needed more nuance. While Tommy Tuberville and many others on the right are opposed to the CTA and the corporate registry, he noted that the current administration is, in fact, “vigorously defending the CTA in court”. Indeed, on February 18, the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas lifted a nationwide injunction it had previously issued. We are happy to provide this update and will revisit this issue in six months. Thanks, Scott, for taking the time to reach out.
In-DEPTH
US AND SOUTH AFRICA – NOT JUST ANOTHER BRICS IN THE WALL
Thanks to the US, South Africa’s presidency of the G20 in 2025 – the first time an African country has played host, as it is the only African member aside from the African Union, which joined in 2023 – hasn’t had a smooth start. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is boycotting the first foreign ministerial meeting this week. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he will not attend a meeting of G20 finance ministers in Cape Town next week. The immediate reason for the boycott, according to a February 7 Executive Order (EO), is US opposition to South Africa’s Expropriation Act – a law expanding the government’s scope for acquiring land from white landowners. The EO freezes bilateral aid and offers refuge to “Afrikaner refugees”. Notably, Trump’s antipathy for President Cyril Ramaphosa and his African National Congress (ANC) government dates back to his first term and the influence of AfriForum, an Afrikaner-rights group aligned with Elon Musk and his attempts to circumvent affirmative action requirements for Starlink in South Africa. While demonstrating how narrow interest groups can have an outsized influence on the current administration, this episode also demonstrates the very real risk that the US will push South Africa and other countries in the Global South into the hands of China and Russia.
The snubbing of the G20 is the most immediate impact of the president’s decision, though arguably the least harmful. The G20 is a moving target and one of the less effective multilateral institutions in the global system because it expends great energy each year in not offending members like China, Russia and, yes, the US. It has no permanent staff, so each presidency, which centers around a summit, usually in the fall, sets the priorities, which end up reflecting the preoccupations of the host country and the news cycle. In 2023, India ensured that the declaration that came out of the summit decried the threat or use of force to seize territory, without naming member Russia or inviting Ukraine. South Africa’s president has said that he will use the nine months between now and the November summit to advance an agenda of strengthening the role of the Global South in multilateral institutions, including the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where the country brought a genocide case against Israel last year for its actions in Gaza.
South Africa’s role in the ICJ case against Israel (which, of course, is headed by Trump ally Benjamin Netanyahu, who himself is wanted by the International Criminal Court, or ICC) means that even a Kamala Harris-led administration would have likely done gymnastics to avoid signing onto collective statements during South Africa’s tenure at the G20 while still attending. But Rubio’s boycott of the first foreign ministerial confab has immediate and potentially far-reaching impacts. With Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in attendance, European ministers will be left to deal with the aftermath of President Trump’s damaging and false claims about Ukraine this week, including the claim that Ukraine’s president is a “dictator”. More broadly, the loss of any US voice at the G20 this year will send the message that America is not invested in efforts to boost the influence of countries like South Africa in global institutions. This could have lasting damage.
Policy captures
For his part, President Ramaphosa has not rushed to appease Trump. Without mentioning the American president by name, he responded in his annual parliamentary address to allegations Trump made on his social media platform about alleged human rights violations (before the publication of the EO), saying: “We are witnessing the rise of nationalism and protectionism, the pursuit of narrow interests and the decline of common cause,” adding that “we will not be bullied.” Since the beginning of the month, Ramaphosa and his government have defended the Expropriation Act by saying it was targeted at unused land or land that can be redistributed for the public good and that legal protections ensured that there would be no arbitrary land seizures. They also noted that no seizures have taken place yet. The specter haunting officials and invoked by critics is the series of violent seizures of white-owned land in Zimbabwe under President Robert Mugabe that took place during that country’s descent into hyperinflation and dictatorship in the early 2000s.
Importantly, the administration’s clash with South Africa appears not to be just a sop to the South Africans in the president’s orbit, such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel or David Sacks, but the product of years of lobbying by an Afrikaner group, AfriForum. Notably, that group’s leader, Kallie Kriel, rejected Trump’s asylum offer in a recent interview with South Africa’s SABC news and restated its allegiance to the country, while complaining that Ramaphosa refused to talk to their organization and address their concerns. Kriel’s criticism of his government goes back many years. As the Guardian has reported, in May 2018, the group’s leadership traveled to the US to lobby the first Trump administration over the ANC’s commitment to land redistribution. An article at the time noted that Kriel’s deputy, Ernst Roets, met at the time with National Security Advisor John Bolton, USAID officials and staffers of Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
Notably, the group is part of the umbrella Solidarity Movement, which said it was planning to have discussions with the White House, where, notably, it said it would ask the American president not to “punish ordinary South Africans” through cutting HIV/AIDS funding or excluding South Africa from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a measure which was not mentioned in the EO, but raised by GOP members of Congress. But, behind this conciliatory language – in his TV interview Kriel appeared at pains to explain that they were not disloyal by lobbying the Americans – is the agenda of Elon Musk, the primus inter pares of several powerful émigré South African in US political and business life. As reported by journalist Anton Ferreira earlier this month, AfriForum has described his influence on the White House as a “benefit to South Africa”, and Ramaphosa apparently even called Musk directly to try and allay “misconceptions” about the Expropriation Act.
Endgame
Not unusually, this policy spat is linked to the business interests of a senior administration figure. For his part, Musk has accused South Africa this month of “openly racist ownership laws”, although he was referring to company ownership, not land. He has been lobbying the South African government seeking an exemption for his Starlink satellite communications network from affirmative action legislation that requires telecommunications operators to provide 30% of equity in the South African entity to Black-owned businesses. This raises an important question, if the South African government did indeed carve out an exception, would this lead to a restoration of US aid? And is the issue a personal one for him?
Musk is, of course, a white South African. However, in the EO, Trump refers explicitly to Afrikaners (descendants of 17th century European colonists of southern Africa who dueled for control with the British Empire over many decades while both oppressed the indigenous majority), which Musk has explicitly said he is not. It is not clear Trump (or whoever wrote the EO for him) understands the distinction despite engaging with AfriForum since 2018. And despite their ethnic identity, Afrikaners – and white South Africans in general – are politically diverse. As Ferreira notes, “[T]hey are not the homogenous group that Trump appears to project. Many do not identify with groups such as AfriForum and do not regard themselves as the victims of black prejudice. Some of the ANC’s staunchest supporters are Afrikaners.”
Taking a step back, the US-South Africa policy conflict appears rooted in Trump’s belief, encouraged by Musk as his close advisor, that the ANC government is engaged in violent expropriation of white landowners. The very real problem of crime in South Africa – it is one of the most violent countries on Earth – has been depicted in some quarters as a campaign against rural white South African farmers, although crime victims are overwhelmingly Black and poor. It appears to inform some of the language of the EO. For South Africa, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Black poverty in South Africa is 64%, while white poverty is around 1%. Officials understand that exclusion from the African Growth and Opportunity Act would be deeply harmful. With around 7.2 million South Africans living with HIV, making the country an epicenter of the epidemic globally, the loss of PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, which contributes around US$400 million a year to combatting the virus) would be little short of devastating. In recent days, media has reported plans for a delegation of business and political figures to travel to Washington to defuse tensions. De-escalating this conflict may require some form of public climbdown by Ramaphosa. This is difficult to imagine, given Ramaphosa’s own larger than life (Trumpian?) persona, the fact that he was just re-elected last year, and the possibility that the nationalist and race issues stirred up in the current fracas could help shore up the ANC’s declining popularity (amid its own corruption scandals) in the short run. The risk for the US is that South Africa – the ‘S’ in the (in)famous Goldman Sachs BRICS formulation – will look to China and Russia for aid and support in multilateral institutions, such as the G20, where the US will be notable this year only by its absence.
