JONATHAN JANSEN | We’ll not be bullied, right? Then here’s how to stand up to the vileness of Trump

How does a vile persona on the other side of the world so easily rattle the fragile unity of the South African polity? The man in question is of course a convicted felon in his own country, a rapist and an unrepentant racist. He is also the US president.

I wondered last week about the intense reaction this man evokes in a region of the world where he would not know the difference between Zimbabwe and Zambia, let alone Zastron and Zeerust. And yet he knew exactly which buttons to push to unravel a tenuous unity with the same facility our World Cup rugby champions had used to build a sense of oneness among us.

Imagine the president of another country offering refugee status to whites called Afrikaners (forget for the moment the meaninglessness of this label in contemporary South Africa). Apparently, Afrikaners are poorly treated, the target of genocide and losing their land under a black government. Apparently.

This man is all about revenge politics and in this case ... The gesture is in reaction to South Africa dragging Washington’s ally, Israel, to the International Court of Justice

Let’s quickly dispense with this nonsense. Whites, about 7% of the population, still own nearly 50% of farming land. There was no mass expropriation of land despite three centuries of displacement and dispossession of the land of the black majority.

There is no genocide by any definition, but there is rampant crime that affects all of us. More black people die than whites in South Africa, even adjusting for "racial" proportions. And no "group" can make more claims on poor treatment than black South Africans where child poverty is the highest, educational standards are the lowest, and among whom squatter settlements have mushroomed.

So what is this complaint about? It is about racial privileges lost. When you are so used to privilege, as someone once said, then equality feels like discrimination. In my business, higher education, I have seen white men with pathetic CVs insist they are better than those who have accomplished more. It is an arrogance I will never understand.

To my white "Afrikaner" compatriots seduced by this vile man, let me say this: if you think Donald Trump is concerned about your welfare, then you are under the same delusion that the lap dancer at a strip club is deeply in love with you. Wake up. This man is all about revenge politics — and in this case, I do not doubt that the gesture is in reaction to South Africa dragging Washington’s ally, Israel, to the International Court of Justice.

Where Trump miscalculated is that the overwhelming majority of "Afrikaners" have no intention of going anywhere — and for good reason. To the racial agitators, the television personality Ruda Landman issued a timely rebuke on X: “A common ancestry doesn’t give anyone the right to speak on my behalf. I’m living very happily in the land I love, working to build it up like so many others, every day.”

This is, after all, a country in which whites have lost little in terms of their material welfare and share the consequences with black people of living in a country that has been corrupted and mismanaged for the better part of three decades. It was this latter reality that caused the ANC to lose its majority in the last election and made the government of national unity possible.

What I would have liked to see is that all political parties in South Africa stood together against Trump and his government with the firm presidential message that we will not be bullied. If South African sovereignty means anything, it should be that we will not be dictated to by a power-reckless Trump who believes that by sheer weight of economic and military advantage, he can exercise control over other territories, from Canada and Mexico to Venezuela. Like all bullies, he only understands one language — stand up to him.

To the South African government, this: get your message straight.

First, our communications on everything from land expropriation to white "genocide" have quite frankly been pathetic.

Second, talk to the nation regularly (a Sona is not enough) and explain what is going on in our country, from the loss of precious lives in the eastern DRC to the $440m (R8.13bn) in direct assistance we received from the US in 2023.

Third, bring your detractors under one tent in these challenging times in international relations. They irk most of us, but talk to the AfriForums of this world, make sure they are heard and re-educate them along the way.

Trump will shortly depart the international stage, and Republicans will in due course be replaced because of what Ron Brownstein so perceptively described as “the fundamental hydraulics of America’s two-party system” (The Atlantic, December 2024). In short, this too shall pass.

In the meantime, we’d do well as South Africans to not overreact to this abuse of “executive orders” by the American president, many of which are being challenged in their federal courts. What the South African government must do, however, is rally support against this passing madness in the court of public opinion.

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