New York Times lambasts Trump for vile ploy on South Africa

NEW YORK, Aug 24 (APP):A leading American newspaper Friday denounced President Donald Trump for weighing in on what the U.S. leader called South Africa’s targeting of white farmers for land seizures and large-scale killing in that country, saying “he knows nothing about the issue.
“Trust President Trump, following his familiar tactic of deflecting attention by using some outrageous tweet, to come down hard on the wrong side of an issue he knows nothing about, based on no more than a slanted Fox programme,” The New York Times said in an editorial, entitled: ‘Trumps Vile Ploy on South Africa’.
The controversy began when Trump tweeted late Wednesday that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.”
Trump’s tweet alleged that the South African government was “seizing land from white farmers.”
On Thursday, the South African government said Trump’s tweet was “based on false information” and called for the US Embassy to explain the President’s remarks.
Land is a complex issue in South Africa. Racist policies of the past forcefully removed black and non-white South Africans from the land for white use.
There has been a land redistribution and restitution provision in the country’s constitution since South Africa held its first democratic elections in 1994. The government has been criticized for not moving quickly enough to settle land disputes.
The political debate over land reform has stepped up a level ahead of next year’s elections.
In its editorial, the Times said the issue deserves a closer look.
Statistics vary, but what is clear is that whites, who are less than 10 percent of the population, continue to own more than two thirds of the land.
That highly skewed distribution of the land and production assets, according to the World Bank, contributes to making South Africa the world’s most unequal country.
This does not mean that expropriation without compensation is a wise remedy, especially in light of the disastrous consequences such action had in undermining the economy in neighboring Zimbabwe.
Nor does it absolve the African National Congress for the corruption that has infected the governing party after two decades of virtually unchallenged rule.
But the editorial refers to an op-ed article Cyril Ramaphosa in the Financial Times in which he denied his proposal was a land grab or that the ANC’s land reform program would undermine investment in the economy or damage agricultural production. The constitutional amendment he is seeking, he told the FT, would strengthen the existing rules by making explicit the conditions under which land can be expropriated without compensation.
All that is subject to debate and study which is now underway, the NYT says.
Yet Mr Trump’s tweet, and the Fox show on which it was based, were bereft of any context, sympathy or understanding. They pounced instead on the false narratives of rightwing white South African groups claiming widespread seizures of white-owned land and continuing white genocide.
In fact the number of killings of farm workers is at a 20-year low.
The editorial continues: Not surprisingly, South Africa reacted angrily to Mr Trump’s tweet, saying it reflected a narrow perspective which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past. Sadly, it probably reflects even less than that a clueless grasp at a racially tinged political diversion.
As Patrick Gaspard, a former American ambassador to South Africa and now President of the Open Society Foundations, tweeted, This man has never visited the continent and has no discernible African policy.
The White House announced this week that Melania Trump would be traveling to several African countries in October without her husband.