🇪🇺🇿🇦 António Costa, President of the European Council, on X:

"On my phone call with President Cyril Ramaphosa, I highlighted the EU’s commitment to deepen ties with South Africa, as a reliable and predictable partner.

I look forward to the bilateral South Africa-EU summit on 13 March.

I expressed the EU’s full support to South Africa’s leadership of G20 and its ambition to strengthen multilateral cooperation and the Pact for the Future to address the most pressing global issues."

https://x.com/eucopresident/status/1889022259186040948

🇿🇦🇺🇸 South Africa to Send 3 Delegations to the U.S. — But Whom Will They Meet?

At least three separate delegations of South Africans are planning to visit the U.S. after President Donald Trump’s criticism of their country’s Expropriation Act last week — but it is not clear whom they will meet in the new administration.

One [delegation] is being organized by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa; one is being arranged by the opposition Democratic Alliance; and another is being arranged by the trade union Solidarity, which tends to represent white and Afrikaans-speaking workers.

The first two delegations seem determined to explain to President Trump why he is wrong; the third seems to want to explain why he is right.

But aside from the lack of a common front, there is also another challenge: there may be no one in a position of responsibility who will meet with them.

President Trump is unlikely to do so, as is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who announced earlier this month that he will not attend a G20 meeting in South Africa next week over the country’s “anti-Americanism.”

South Africa’s leaders seem to believe that the focus should be persuasion behind closed doors in Washington rather than change to failing policies at home.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/02/12/south-africa-to-send-three-delegations-to-the-u-s-but-whom-will-they-meet/

🇺🇳🇿🇦 UN backs SA’s Land Act as step to address racial land imbalance

The United Nations (UN) Human Rights Office in Geneva has described South Africa’s Land Expropriation Act as a critical step in addressing the country’s racially imbalanced land ownership.

https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/unhr-backs-sas-land-act-as-step-to-address-racial-land-imbalance/

👨‍🌾 Jacques Broodryk, AfriForum Spokesperson for Community Safety:

▫️Expropriation with nil compensation. Let's look at the bigger picture: Over the past two decades, the ANC government has used multiple avenues to weaken landowners rights and make them vulnerable to expropriation.

▫️Removing Water Rights:

Landowners used to own the water on their land. That changed with the National Water Act of 1998, which transferred ownership of all water resources to the state.

Now, farmers must apply for water-use licenses, which can be denied at the government’s discretion. Proposed legislation to apply racial criteria in awarding such licenses is also currently on the table.

▫️Stripping Mineral Rights

In 2004, the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) abolished private ownership of minerals. Landowners no longer control the resources beneath their own soil—the state does.

Mining rights can now be handed to politically connected companies, while landowners have little say in the matter.

▫️A recent example is CJ Williams en Seuns Boerdery vs. Stuart Coal in Delmas. The farmer refused the mining company access to his property because no compensation agreement had been reached.

Instead of defending the landowner’s rights, the Mpumalanga High Court ruled in favor of the mining company, granting them access despite no settlement being reached. This sets a dangerous precedent: landowners are powerless against state-backed mining companies.

▫️Many farms have been targeted in this manner, with farmers simply finding notices of exploration stuck to their fences. If they want to fight it, it again leads to a costly legal battle against those with mining interests.

📎 Jacques Broodryk

🇺🇸🇿🇦 The U.S. Embassy in South Africa acknowledges the petition addressed to President Donald Trump.

The full text of the memorandum will be transmitted to the President and the Secretary of State for immediate action.

📎 US Embassy SA

🇺🇸🇿🇦 Why you can't blame AfriForum

One simple statistic explains all you need to know about why South Africa is being targeted by the United States

The entirety of South Africa’s voting history in the UNHRC/HCR, where it differs from consensus, has been in concert with two blocs – former communist hegemons and their present allies (Eastern alliance) and the African Group. The former is composed of Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Cuba, DPR Korea, Belarus, Myanmar and Venezuela.

Out of all the non-consensus motions South Africa voted in favour of, 89.6% were introduced by these countries. Of the human rights situations they either abstained from or voted against taking action in, 88.8% of these situations were caused by the same group of countries.

South Africa has often gone out of its way to protect friends and allies around the world, no matter how venal. In 2015, the ANC government gave shelter to Omar Bashir for the duration of the African Union Summit, despite Bashir being wanted for several crimes against humanity in his war on the people of Darfur, including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, and rape, as well as three counts of genocide.

The reasons for this are quite clear – the allegiance between the ANC and the communist countries in the Cold War, which coincided closely with the duration of National Party rule in South Africa, was particularly strong, as South Africa’s government was overtly tolerated by the United States and its allies until the late 1970s, and covertly supported (with certain accompanying pressures to reform) until the late 1980s.

The ANC is also a Pan-Africanist organisation, and sees Africa as a whole as existing in opposition to the West, a victim of imperialism both in colonial and neocolonial terms, and seeks to promote African interests against those of the West. Its allies on the continent are viewed through the lens of a common struggle, leading to often weaselly-sounding slogans like “quiet diplomacy” masking (not-so) covert solidarity.

Israel in particular is remembered, not for their 1961 UNGA vote to sanction South Africa, but for their subsequently “embarrassingly good relations” in the following decades which has earned a special place on the ANC’s blacklist, and has been part of the motivation for comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa.

In Zimbabwe, the ANC utterly refused to countenance any countermeasures or sanctions against Mugabe’s violent landgrabs, rigged elections or ethnic cleansing of the Matabele. Under Thabo Mbeki’s stance of “quiet diplomacy”, there was no public censure. Mbeki opposed Zimbabwe’s removal from the Commonwealth of Nations, sidelined South African critics of Mugabe, refused to criticise vote rigging the 2002 and 2008parliamentary elections, supported the land grabs as “necessary”, and gave salutary honours to Robert Mugabe on the occasion of his state funeral in 2019.

https://www.capeindependent.com/article/why-you-cant-blame-afriforum