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CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — South African President Cyril Ramaphosa
spoke with Donald Trump’s “influential” billionaire adviser Elon Musk a
day after the new U.S. president promised to cut funding for South Africa
over a land expropriation law, Ramaphosa’s spokesperson said Wednesday.

Ramaphosa’s conversation with Musk was “logical,” spokesperson Vincent
Magwenya said, because the South African-born Tesla and SpaceX
entrepreneur has held previous investment-related discussions with
Ramaphosa and is a Trump ally.

WATCH: Protests erupt as Elon Musk moves to gut government agencies

The land law, which was signed by Ramaphosa last month, is contentious
because it gives the government scope to expropriate land from private
parties.

Trump announced Sunday that he would stop financial assistance while the
U.S. investigated why South Africa was “confiscating land” from some
people, without saying who. He told reporters wrongly that the South
African government was taking away land and “actually they’re doing things
that are perhaps far worse than that.” Trump again didn’t provide details.

The South African government said Trump’s announcement and related
criticism of the country by Musk was full of “misinformation and
distortions” and the call to Musk was to set the record straight.

Musk, who is leading the Trump administration’s new Department of
Government Efficiency, has long criticized the government in his homeland,
a key U.S. trading partner in Africa, as being anti-white and has cast the
law in question as a deliberate act to take land away from its white
minority.

He faces scrutiny in the U.S. for his control over parts of the federal government, but the South Africa issue also shows his influence on U.S.
foreign policy.

Should Trump follow through on his promise to cut South Africa’s funding,
it would stop nearly half a billion dollars a year in assistance, the vast majority of it for the world’s biggest HIV/AIDS program.

South Africa has the highest number of people living with HIV in the world
at more than 8 million, with around 5.5 million on antiretroviral
medication. The U.S. funds around 17% of South Africa’s HIV program
through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR,
and gave the country $440 million in assistance last year.

The South African government said no land has been confiscated, and even
groups in South Africa that have been critical of the new law said Trump
was wrong in claiming any land had been taken away.

“We will respond expeditiously to disinformation and mischaracterization
of our laws as well as the general state of the country,” Magwenya,
Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, told reporters Wednesday. “We were obviously perturbed by the substance of the announcement (by Trump) because there
were clearly inaccuracies.”

Magwenya said South Africa hoped to have more engagements with the Trump administration at various levels, including with “influential figures like
Elon Musk.”

The new law targets land that is unused or not being utilized in the
public interest, and property rights are protected, according to the government. No land has been taken under the law, which was only signed by Ramaphosa two weeks ago and is a result of years of consultations and Parliamentary debates.

It is designed to address some of the wrongs of South Africa’s previous apartheid regime of white minority rule, where Black people had land taken
away from them and were forced to live in designated areas for non-whites.
The last land audit in South Africa estimated that whites — who make up 7%
of the population of 62 million — own around 70% of land.

In addition to the land law, Musk, who grew up in South Africa, has
criticized its affirmative action policies and has falsely claimed that
the killings of some white farmers amount to “genocide.” The killings have
been condemned but experts say they are part of South Africa’s appallingly
high levels of violent crime and are generally connected to farm
robberies.

Musk has put forward an overriding view that South African authorities are racist against their white citizens, but his stance has also become
intertwined with his business interests. Musk accused South Africa on his social media site X this week of having “racist ownership laws.”

While it wasn’t clear exactly what he was referencing, it appeared to be
the country’s affirmative action laws that require part-Black ownership of
some companies, also an attempt to rectify historic wrongs under
apartheid, which ended in 1994. Musk left South Africa after completing
high school in the late 1980s and moved to Canada.
Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service has been denied a license in
South Africa because it doesn’t meet affirmative action criteria.

Ramaphosa held prior discussions with Musk over the possibility of him investing in South Africa, Magwenya said. “His (Musk’s) particular issues
were around Starlink, as well as the regulatory environment that regulates
that sector.”

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/after-trumps-funding-threat-south- african-president-phones-influential-billionaire-musk

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