{"id":825101,"date":"2025-05-21T19:46:46","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T17:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=825101"},"modified":"2025-05-21T19:48:38","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T17:48:38","slug":"ramaphosa-rupert-and-world-class-golfers-take-on-trump-in-heated-exchange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/825101\/ramaphosa-rupert-and-world-class-golfers-take-on-trump-in-heated-exchange\/","title":{"rendered":"Ramaphosa, Rupert and world-class golfers take on Trump in heated exchange"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>President Donald Trump rejected South African President Cyril Ramaphosa\u2019s argument that there\u2019s no genocide against White Afrikaners, airing a video and showing images in the Oval Office that he said showed how they were beaten and killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The meeting on Wednesday (21 May) appeared to fulfil the worst fears of some of Ramaphosa\u2019s advisers that the South African leader was walking into a trap.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cEach one of those white things you see is a cross, and there\u2019s approximately a thousand of them. They\u2019re all white farmers,\u201d Trump said, pointing to the video that aired on a television screen positioned to the side of the two leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ramaphosa had initially struck&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2025-05-20\/south-african-president-strikes-upbeat-tone-before-trump-meeting\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an upbeat tone<\/a>&nbsp;at the meeting, calling for a reset in ties between the two countries and to advance trade. He even offered Trump a book about golf in South Africa \u2014 he said it weighed 14 kilograms \u2014 and said he had started practicing the sport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the meeting went off the rails quickly after Ramaphosa was asked what could be done to bring Trump around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans, some of whom are his good friends, like those who are here, when we have talks between us,\u201d Ramaphosa said. He later said those calling for expropriation represented a \u201csmall minority\u201d of the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the run-up to the meeting, some of Ramaphosa advisers feared that their boss was being set up for an Oval Office humiliation similar to the one what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy experienced earlier this year when Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated him over his handling of Russia\u2019s invasion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The result was nearly the same: a heated exchange, in which Ramaphosa denied white South Africans were being singled out and Trump insisting that farmers were being killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Trump was joined in the room by his billionaire, Pretoria-born backer Elon Musk. Both have spread the conspiracy theory that the country that ended apartheid is conducting a genocide against the White minority that once ruled it. South African golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen were also in attendance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"President Ramaphosa&#039;s White House visit\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OeHU6GQP3-I?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Trump has objected to a land bill that Ramaphosa signed late last year that will make it easier for the government to expropriate private property if it\u2019s in the public interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While similar to eminent domain laws in the US, the law in South Africa allows for expropriation without compensation in certain cases such as land that\u2019s been abandoned and state-owned property not in use. For now, no land has been seized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The South African president sought to explain the law and it\u2019s relationship to the country\u2019s apartheid era.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe are completely opposed to that,\u201d Ramaphosa said in response to a question about whether he denounced the remarks from those who appeared in the video.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ramaphosa, a lawyer who has led South Africa since 2018, was accompanied on his trip by the agriculture minister \u2014 a White man who called claims of genocide \u201cnonsense\u201d \u2014 along with the trade and foreign ministers as well as billionaire Johann Rupert. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In February, Trump froze almost all aid to Pretoria, claiming it persecuted White Afrikaner farmers and took \u201caggressive positions\u201d toward the US, including filling a court case in the International Court of Justice that accuses Israel of genocide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Last week, the US granted a first batch of White Afrikaners refugee status, flying them in on a chartered plane and twice repeated the claim that they are suffering a genocide.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe have had a tremendous number of people, especially since they\u2019ve seen this, generally they\u2019re white farmers, and they\u2019re fleeing South Africa, and it\u2019s a you know, it\u2019s a very sad thing to see, but I hope we can have an explanation of that, because I know you don\u2019t want that,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The standoff between the two nations has cast a shadow over South Africa\u2019s presidency of the Group of 20, with Trump and his top officials shunning meetings of the bloc and rejecting calls for it to focus on addressing issues such reducing developing nations\u2019 debt and climate change.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Els and Goosen were invited to share their own anecdotes on life in South Africa, with both giving a frank account of the dangers posed to not only white farmers, but all South Africans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rupert remarked that he was a primary target for race-based virtriol from those presented in the video, but he directed the conversation towards solutions, appealing to Trump to assist South Africa with technology and investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A lingering message in the meeting was one of driving investment to South Africa to help build the economy, create jobs, and ultimately take on the social problems which threatened the people Trump had built his views around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>(Additional reporting by BusinessTech)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>President Cyril Ramaphosa and his high-profile entourage felt the heat in a tricky exchange with US President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":821718,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-825101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=825101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":825102,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825101\/revisions\/825102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/821718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=825101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=825101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=825101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}