By Nkiruka Nnorom, with agency report

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, yesterday, denied that his country confiscates land from white farmers and commits genocide against them, as he was pressed on the issue by US President Donald Trump.

Trump hosted the South Africa’s leader and members of his delegates at the Oval Office amid tensions between both countries.

Trump had repeatedly claimed that South Africans have been persecuting Afrikaners and had offered to take them as in refugees. Last week, the first batch of Afrikaners, totaling 50, who have accepted the refugee status, landed in the US.

Trump has also been accusing the South Africa’s government of taking lands belonging to the whites, an allegation the government has severally denied.

Responding to Trump’s claims of land confiscation, Ramaphosa said: “Our constitution guarantees and protects the sanctity of tenure of land ownership, and that constitution protects all South Africans with regard to land ownership,” Ramaphosa said, starting to explain that his government aims to redistribute land due to iniquities in the country from the decades-long apartheid regime that ruled South Africa until 1994.
“Your government also has the right to expropriate land for public use,” Ramaphosa continued, before the US president interrupted him. “You’re taking people’s land away from them,” Trump said.

“We have not,” Ramaphosa responded, before the US president continued.

Earlier this year, the South Africa’s government enacted the expropriation law in an attempt to reverse historic racial inequalities. The law empowers South Africa’s government to take land and redistribute it with no obligation to pay compensation in some instances if the seizure is found to be “just and equitable and in the public interest.”

During the discriminatory apartheid era, Black South Africans were forcibly dispossessed of their lands for the benefit of White South Africans. Today, some three decades after the end of apartheid, Black citizens, who comprise over 80 percent of the country’s population of 63 million, own around four percent of private land.

On the genocide claims, Trump said: “They’re being executed, and they happen to be White, and most of them happen to be farmers, and that’s a tough situation. I don’t know how you explain that.”

Disputing the issue of genocide after Trump played a 5 minutes video to substantiate the claim, the South Africa’s leader said: “If there was Afrikaner farmer genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here, including my minister of agriculture, he would not be with me,” said Ramaphosa, referring to White members of his delegation, which included South African golfers Retief Goosen and Ernie Els and his country’s agriculture minister, John Henry Steenhuisen.