This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

South Africa has described a tweet by Donald Trump ordering his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to look into the alleged seizure of farms and “large-scale killing of farmers” as polarising and based on false information and lobbying.

Trump’s controversial tweet followed a segment on Fox News on Wednesday in which the host Tucker Carlson claimed the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, had started “seizing land from his own citizens without compensation because they are the wrong skin colour”, and called the action “immoral”.

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On Thursday, South Africa accused the US president of stoking racial divisions and summoned Washington’s chargée d’affaires in South Africa, Jessye Lapenn.

Trump’s tweet delighted white nationalists in the US, who have increasingly made South African land rights a talking point, but prompted derision and anger in South Africa.

All major political parties in South Africa agree on the need for extensive land reform in the country, where 72% of agricultural land is in the hands of white farmers, according to the Land Audit Report, despite white people making up 8% of the population.

On 1 August, Ramaphosa announced that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party would move forward with plans to change the constitution to allow the expropriation of land without compensation, a motion passed by parliament in February.

Almost 25 years after the end of apartheid, the land issue has become a focus of economic and social grievances in what has remained one of the most unequal countries in the world.

Public hearings are under way to gauge support for the policy.

Some analysts say the policy has been advanced to rally grassroots support for the ANC before a difficult general election next year, and that Ramaphosa has little intention of implementing widespread and hugely disruptive measures.

The claims of large-scale killing of white farmers were dismissed by experts.

Though the statistics relating to violence against white farmers are contested, research by one of South Africa’s biggest farmers’ organisations shows that murders are at a 20-year low. In 2017-18, 47 farmers were killed, according to AgriSA. Violence against farmers peaked in 1998, when 153 died. Between 80 and 100 were murdered each year from 2003 to 2011, and then about 60 until 2016.

Despite the decline in the number of deaths, there has been a rise in the number of attacks on farms, from 478 in 2016-17 to 561 a year later.

“The murders on farms are a reflection of the security situation in South Africa. There is absolutely no evidence that the violence is aimed at white farmers,” said Gareth Newham, the head of the crime and justice programme at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria.

Representatives of the agriculture business in South Africa condemned Trump’s “volatile” statements at a critical time.

US diplomatic representatives have also been told of Pretoria’s disappointment with “Washington’s failure to use available diplomatic channels”, a reference to Trump’s use of social media.

A statement from the Department for International Relations said Trump’s tweet was based on “lobbying by certain South African lobby groups that seek to derail and frustrate the land redistribution programme” and “serves only to polarise debate on this sensitive and crucial matter”.

“The government of South Africa wishes to caution against alarmist, false, inaccurate and misinformed, as well as – in some cases – politically motivated statements that do not reflect the policies and intentions of the South African government,” it said.

Senior officials from AfriForum, a controversial lobby group that campaigns for the interests of South Africa’s white Afrikaans-speaking minority and opposes the new land policy, met Carlson, the Fox News host cited by Trump, in the US in May.

Officials from AfriForum welcomed Trump’s tweet on Thursday, saying it would put pressure on South African authorities to act.

The US Department of State spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the US believed land confiscation without compensation in South Africa would take the country “down the wrong path”.