South African president phones influential billionaire Musk after Trump’s funding threat

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — South African President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke with Donald Trump’s “influential” billionaire adviser Elon Musk a day after the new U.S. president promised to cut funding for South Africa over a land expropriation law, Ramaphosa’s spokesperson said Wednesday.

Ramaphosa’s conversation with Musk was “logical,” spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said, because the South African-born Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur has held previous investment-related discussions with Ramaphosa and is a Trump ally.

The land law, which was signed by Ramaphosa last month, is contentious because it gives the government scope to expropriate land from private parties.

Trump announced Sunday that he would stop financial assistance while the U.S. investigated why South Africa was “confiscating land” from some people, without saying who. He told reporters wrongly that the South African government was taking away land and “actually they’re doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.” Trump again didn’t provide details.

The South African government said Trump’s announcement and related criticism of the country by Musk was full of “misinformation and distortions” and the call to Musk was to set the record straight.

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Musk, who is leading the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency, has long criticized the government in his homeland, a key U.S. trading partner in Africa, as being anti-white and has cast the law in question as a deliberate act to take land away from its white minority.

He faces scrutiny in the U.S. for his control over parts of the federal government, but the South Africa issue also shows his influence on U.S. foreign policy.

Should Trump follow through on his promise to cut South Africa’s funding, it would stop nearly half a billion dollars a year in assistance, the vast majority of it for the world’s biggest HIV/AIDS program.

South Africa has the highest number of people living with HIV in the world at more than 8 million, with around 5.5 million on antiretroviral medication. The U.S. funds around 17% of South Africa’s HIV program through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, and gave the country $440 million in assistance last year.

The South African government said no land has been confiscated, and even groups in South Africa that have been critical of the new law said Trump was wrong in claiming any land had been taken away.

“We will respond expeditiously to disinformation and mischaracterization of our laws as well as the general state of the country,” Magwenya, Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, told reporters Wednesday. “We were obviously perturbed by the substance of the announcement (by Trump) because there were clearly inaccuracies.”

Magwenya said South Africa hoped to have more engagements with the Trump administration at various levels, including with “influential figures like Elon Musk.”

The new law targets land that is unused or not being utilized in the public interest, and property rights are protected, according to the government. No land has been taken under the law, which was only signed by Ramaphosa two weeks ago and is a result of years of consultations and Parliamentary debates.

It is designed to address some of the wrongs of South Africa’s previous apartheid regime of white minority rule, where Black people had land taken away from them and were forced to live in designated areas for non-whites. The last land audit in South Africa estimated that whites — who make up 7% of the population of 62 million — own around 70% of land.

In addition to the land law, Musk, who grew up in South Africa, has criticized its affirmative action policies and has falsely claimed that the killings of some white farmers amount to “genocide.” The killings have been condemned but experts say they are part of South Africa’s appallingly high levels of violent crime and are generally connected to farm robberies.

Musk has put forward an overriding view that South African authorities are racist against their white citizens, but his stance has also become intertwined with his business interests. Musk accused South Africa on his social media site X this week of having “racist ownership laws.”

While it wasn’t clear exactly what he was referencing, it appeared to be the country’s affirmative action laws that require part-Black ownership of some companies, also an attempt to rectify historic wrongs under apartheid, which ended in 1994. Musk left South Africa after completing high school in the late 1980s and moved to Canada.

Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service has been denied a license in South Africa because it doesn’t meet affirmative action criteria.

Ramaphosa held prior discussions with Musk over the possibility of him investing in South Africa, Magwenya said. “His (Musk’s) particular issues were around Starlink, as well as the regulatory environment that regulates that sector.”

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AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa