President Cyril Ramaphosa called a group of 59 white South Africans who moved to the United States to reinstall “cowards”, saying “they will come back soon”.
The Afrikaners group arrived in the United States on Monday after President Donald Trump granted them refugee status, saying that they were facing racial discrimination.
But Ramaphosa said that those who wanted to leave were not satisfied with the efforts to respond to the inequalities of the apartheid past, describing their relocation as “sad moment for them”.
“As South Africans, we are resilient. We do not move away from our problems. We must stay here and solve our problems. When you run away, you are a coward, and it is a real cowardly act,” he added.
Trump and his close ally, born in South Africa, Elon Musk, said that there was a “genocide” of white farmers in South Africa – an assertion that was largely discredited.
The United States has also accused the South African government of seizing the land of white farmers without paying compensation.
More than 30 years after the end of the decades of rule of the white minority of South Africa, black farmers only have a small fraction of the best agricultural land in the country, the majority still in white hands, leading to anger against the slow pace of change.
In January, President Ramaphosa signed a controversial law allowing the government to seize private land without compensation in certain circumstances, when it is deemed “fair and in the public interest”.
But the government says that no land has yet been seized under the law.
Trump proposed to reinstall white Afrikaners, settlers for most of the Dutch, saying that they were fleeing a “terrible situation” in South Africa.
Speaking on Monday during an agricultural exhibition in the free state province, Ramaphosa said that Afrikaners moved to the United States because they were not “favorably eliminated” to efforts to meet the country’s challenges.
“If you look at all the national groups in our country, in black and white, they have stayed in this country because it is our country and we must not move away from our problems. We must stay here and solve our problems,” said Ramaphosa.
“I can bet they will come back soon because there is no country like South Africa,” he added.
His remark as a “coward” has angry certain social media users, who condemned him as an insult to the injured white South Africans.
The Afrikaners group was welcomed by senior American officials who said they had “living under a shadow of violence and terror” in South Africa.
“Welcome to the land of free,” said deputy secretary of state Chris Landau on Monday receiving the South Africans who landed at Dulles airport near Washington DC on Monday.
Some have held young children and agitated small American flags in the arrival area decorated with red, white and blue balloons on the walls.
Earlier Monday, President Ramaphosa told a CEO forum in Africa in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, which he had recently declared to Trump during a telephone call that the American assessment of the situation was “not true”.
“We are the only country on the continent where the colonizers came to stay and we have never driven them from our country,” he added, rejecting the statements of Afrikaners were persecuted.
Ramaphosa said dozens of white South Africans who have arrived in the United States “do not correspond to the bill” for refugees.
According to the United States Embassy in South Africa, to be considered eligible for the refugee resettlement program, someone must be:
- Of South African nationality
- Afrikaner or a racial minority
- Capable of quoting an incident of past persecution or fear of persecution in the future.
The South African chief said that he had to meet his American counterpart soon to meet the issue.
Trump threatened to boycott the next G20 summit in South Africa unless the “situation is taken care of”.
