Trump’s South Africa Policy Must Be Guided by The Kofi Annan Land Redistribution Philosophy

The expulsion of South Africa’s Ambassador to the United States by President Donald John Trump, via an order issued through Secretary-of-State Marco Rubio, is not wholly to be unexpected. It was only a matter of time. In a news report announcing this high-tension diplomatic decision, Mr. Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s Chief Diplomat to the United States, was accused of being gulity of “race-baiting” and personal animus for the President of the United States of America (POTUS). Which comes as rather amusing because Mr. Trump has himself not been known to conduct himself and his Anti-DEI governance policies above race-baiting level, however subtle this may appear to be, at least by the lights of many an “Antifascist” (Antifa) American citizen and/or resident, irrespective of ideological stance and political affiliation (See “South Africa Responds to ‘Rgrettable’ US Expulsion of Its Ambassador” TAG24 News 3/15/25).

It is not wholly unexpected if also because in recent months, diplomatic tensions have steadily mounted between Washington and Pretoria to near-boiling point, largely based on a disagreement over a 1994 South African Land-Reform Act that justifiably and progressively sought to reverse the colonial-era expropriation of Indigenous African Lands by the Boer-Afrikaner Apartheid Regime, that ultimately resulted in 7-percent of the white-settler population of the country occupying 72-percent of arable farmlands. The South African-born and American resident putative richest man in the world, Mr. Elon Musk, is widely alleged to be the forefront of the fierce resistance by sworn “Oranian” or Nationalist and Segregationist White South Africans to buck the otherwise morally refreshing and politically progressive land-reform policies of the Post-Apartheid Black-Majority Government of the Post-Mandela South Africa.

Now, whatever the real case scenario on the ground may be, this author and critic almost invariably tends to unreservedly agree with the ideological and the philosophical stance of the legendary Ghanaian-born and immortalized first Indifenous Continental African United Nations’ Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi Annan, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, that while it unarguably made perfect and good moral sense and one that mustered the principles social justice and fairness for forcibly and criminally expropriated Indigenous African Lands to be legally and legitimately reclaimed, irredentist fashion, the equally morally significant fact also remained that such measures as were taken by democratically elected governments like President Cyril Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC), took critical account of the need for such lands, as may be legitimately and justifiably “liberated” from the descendants of settler European predators to be productively used for the socioeconomic benefit of both the allodial owners and the greater community of the nation at large.

The initial or original admonishment by the Ghanaian-born Mr. Annan was in reference to a similar measure that was being implemented by the Robert Mugabe government in Zimbabwe, the former British Colony of Rhodesia. Now, what the foregoing means is that alongside the legitimate transfer of lands ought to also be implemented a comprehensive program that seeks to equip those to whom such lands are transferred with the requisite state-of-the-art commercial agriculture skills needed to effectively put such lands to productive and profitable use, in both the long and the short term. We are not here simply talking about basic farming and/or agricultural techniques but the entire panoply of industrial agriculture in its multifaceted forms, including manufacturing and the distribution or the mechanization of the same.

A mutually beneficial relationship, such as the Ramaphosa government says that it is committed to building with the United States, must necessitate the uncompromising foregrounding of the jealous protection of the human rights and the dignity of the overwhelming majority of the deliberately and the systematically deprived citizens and residents of Post-Apartheid South Africa. I am having an extremely difficult time fathoming the Trump White House and the Rubio State Department being capable of forging a constructive and a progressive policy of mutuality that reconizes the inviolable need for the promotion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or Inclusivity (DEI) in Post-Apartheid South Africa, when such a policy, which is deeply embedded and subtended by social justice and a recognition of democratic cultural engagement, and one that takes serious account of historically and artificially created human and interethnic and racial inequities, has been peremptorily and summarily abrogated or eviscerated hereabouts the United States of America by the right-wing Republican Party-sponsored Trump Government.

Already, we see on the horizon, the eerie and sinister attempt by the Trump Government to employ a “Putinesque” strategy in its dealings with the Islamic State of Iran and the latter’s widely alleged paramilitary Houthi proxies in Yemen and the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aden vicinity. The striking similarity here with the diplomatic fracas fast brewing over the Panama Canal is not lost on even the most politically stolid among us. There is not much that this writer can say about the recently expelled South African Ambassador to the United States, Mr. Ebrahim Rasool, since until his recent expulsion his was not a familiar name on the Rolodex of Yours Truly, although Mr. Rasool is known to have served as South Africa’s Chief Diplomat to the United States for some five years well before his recent expulsion by the Trump Government.

Still, one is almost tempted to observe that highly likely, whatever threshold Ambassador Rasool may have breached in order to so sharply provoke the ire of Washington or the Trump Administration, was probably much lower than would have caused his expulsion under any of the previous US governments or administrations during whose tenures he was South Africa’s Chief Diplomat to the United States. One also has a feeling of Mr. Rasool’s being much too temperamentally closer to Mr. Trump in ways that made the latter obviously feel very uncomfortable. A matter of identical avians repelling one another?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
March 15, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]