By Phakamisa Mayaba
US President Donald Trump’s decision to snub the G20 summit in Johannesburg later this month has resulted in something that oscillates between panic and a lackadaisical ‘it’s their loss’ from President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Although not a huge surprise, it would still have been grating for the ‘leader of the free world’ to start taking broadsides and practically flipping the bird at South Africa’s efforts at a ‘diplomatic reset’. It’s embarrassing, and impels you to get your best PR hacks scrambling to do some urgent bootlicking — maybe ask Anton Rupert to speed-dial the Oval Office, or Ernie Els to challenge Potus to an easy round of golf. Maybe even let him win.
Being in Trump’s bad books is never a good thing. Even some of our orthodox head-banging cadres haven’t taken the news very well. One group, however, that appears chuffed, if not openly having a field day, are the Siamese twins of Afriforum and Solidariteit. They are apparently sokkie-sokkie-ing even though much of the country doesn’t see anything to chuckle about.
Recently, Solidariteit put up a banner in the middle of Johannesburg that ingeniously sought to welcome G20 delegates ‘to the most race-regulated country in the world. The timing couldn’t have been better, given Trump’s own headline post a while ago:
The City of Johannesburg removed the banner, but Solidariteit had a cheeky response: they simply put up another one. For former MP and podcaster Renaldo Gous and like-minded disciples, this was an opportunity not to be passed up. In an open letter heading a petition (7 310 signatures at the time of writing), Gous wrote:
‘We wholeheartedly embrace the narrative that highlights the targeted suffering of Afrikaners and other minorities amid South Africa’s escalating challenges. Far from misleading, this framing truthfully exposes the brutal realities: farm murders, land expropriations without compensation, and discriminatory policies that disproportionately victimise white farmers and other minority groups.’
By the time the second banner was taken down, Solidariteit was gatvol, and threatened to take legal action against the City. ‘Kill the Boer’ … ‘race-regulated country … ’ — all is, I suppose, fair in love and war. Nonetheless, these openly provocative actions compel one to ponder about to what the duo’s motives may be.
Following Afriforum’s equally left-field announcement urging the Khampepe commission to investigate ANC ‘terrorism’ during apartheid, I published a piece on my website, eParkeni. It wasn’t about whether or not the ANC had indeed committed atrocities during apartheid, but whether the call by the lobby group came from a place earnestly seeking justice, or was merely another attempt to play to the gallery and do some race-baiting.
Their call had come on the eve of the Khampepe commission as well as during the ongoing inquest into the deaths of the Cradock Four. It seemed about as believable as that Afriforum were truly seeking justice in Gabriella Engels’s 2017 assault case than an opportunity to nail Grace Mugabe, wife of late Zimbabwean president Robert. To believe that they were would be tantamount to accepting that Julius Malema really meant it if he should instruct the faithful to ‘kiss the Boer’. Like, really?
The entire G20 saga, coupled with the Trump administration’s efforts to do some race-based juicing-up of immigration laws so as to give preferential treatment to white refugees, particularly ‘persecuted Afrikaners’, shores up Afriforum’s and Solidarity’s influence among their members. However, it is mostly when faced with questions from the media that reading between the lines becomes crucial. On one recent overseas news programme, Solidariteit’s Head of Public Liaison, Jaco Kleynhans, ducked and dived almost as much as Afriforum’s Kallie Kriel did on the News24 interview I cited on eParkeni.
Under some grilling around ‘Kill the Boer’, Kleynhans responded: ‘There’s a problem in the relationship between South Africa and America. President Donald Trump earlier this year demanded … farm murders to be declared a priority crime like the crime on the Cape Flats. The Trump administration is very concerned about the Expropriation Act … and racial laws.’
The deadpan news anchor then asks: ‘You were quoted earlier this year as saying that Solidarity’s trips to Washington were designed to save trade agreements, I’d put it to you this evening that you’ve practically torpedoed them.’
Kleynhans: ‘Absolutely the opposite. We are very much working with the White House and with Congress … on very, very solid proposals, at least against certain industries in South Africa [to be] excluded from the thirty percent import duties. The only party that torpedoed the trade relationship were the ANC and the unwillingness of the South African government to understand how serious this break of the relationship between the two countries [is] and to look into the very serious allegations that the American government made against South Africa in terms of our foreign policy but also discrimination.’
One can only guess what said ‘industries’ are or whether there was any attempt on the part of Solidariteit to implore Trump on reinstating PEPFAR, the HIV/AIDS funding programme that Trump culled earlier this year, effectively putting the most vulnerable further down the slope.
Kleynhans then goes on to reject ever having said anything about farm murders ‘not yet being fully fledged genocide’. For him, it’s only a matter of concern that there are between five and ten farm attacks every week ‘in a country where there is less than 30 000 commercial farmers. If the crime on the Cape Flats and rhino poaching can be priority crimes, then farm attacks can also be priority crimes. That’s what we’re asking for, and that’s what the American government is demanding.’
‘You’re using some very outdated statistics,’ says the anchor; ‘you look back to the January to March crime stats for this year, ten attacks on farms resulting in six deaths, five of them black South Africans.’ Kleynhans then explains that they’ve never said that farm attacks only involve white South Africans.
Asks the anchor: ‘So why are you and your sister organisation Afriforum just putting more nonsense in Trump’ s head when there’s enough in there already?’ Here, Kleynhans insists that it is only facts that his organisation puts before the White House. Facts about expropriation, race laws and farm attacks.
However, history has shown Afriforum to be less than honest around these matters. On several platforms, their leaders have often been caught in a web of deceit, with the supposed facts debunked over and again. As for social media, they have ruffled more than a few feathers and are either deeply loved or equally resented. Be it their intention or not, their actions have given voice to a frightening fringe of racist nationalists.
Ironically, they too have inspired some 44 Afrikaner professionals to pen an open letter of their own to say: ‘Let us be clear: South Africa faces serious challenges – crime, inequality and the enduring legacy of apartheid. But these issues affect South Africans of all races. To cherry-pick white suffering and elevate it above others is dishonest and harmful. It feeds extremist ideologies that perpetuate division and have inspired real-world violence, including mass shootings.’
Most South Africans would probably drink to that, but Afriforum and Solidariteit seem to be dancing to an entirely different. Tune. Whether it’s coming from Pretoria or Washington is sometimes hard to say.
FEATURED IMAGE: Solidariteit’s controversial banner in Johannesburg, before it was taken down. (Image on X)