South Africa’s government has
summoned US Chargé d’Affaires Jessye Lapenn over US President Donald Trump’s
tweet on Pretoria’s land policy.
On his Twitter on Wednesday,
Trump said he had asked Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, to investigate South
Africa’s “land and farm seizures and expropriations and large scale killing of
farmers.”
Shortly after Trump’s comment,
South Africa responded in a tweet that it “totally rejects this narrow
perception, which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our
colonial past.”
The South African government
added that the country would “speed up the pace of land reform in a careful and
inclusive manner that does not divide” the nation.
Early this month, President Cyril
Ramaphosa announced that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) was moving
ahead with plans to alter the constitution in order to allow the expropriation
of land without compensation, as white South Africans still owned most of the
country’s land nearly a quarter of a century after the collapse of the
apartheid system in South Africa.
Ramaphosa is trying to accelerate
land reform plans before the 2019 general election in order to “undo a grave
historical injustice” against the black people during colonialism and the
apartheid era that ended in 1994.
White community in South Africa
constitute eight percent of the population possessing 72 percent of farms,
while only four percent of the lands are owned by black people making up 80
percent of the population.
According to the AgriSA, an
association of agricultural groups across South Africa, 47 farmers have been
killed in South Africa since 2017.
The number of attacks on farmers
has undergone an increase from 478 in 2016-17 to 561 this year, but the
government’s involvement in the killings remains unclear.
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