A Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) article published in The Jerusalem Post on May 16, “Selective sanctuary: South Africa’s chief rabbi supports Donald Trump but says his refugee program for Afrikaners is a ‘mistake,’” fails in several respects to convey my position on South Africa and America and goes on to make several mistakes of omission or understanding in addition.
The growth rate of South Africa’s economy is far too slow to erode its very high rate of unemployment. Whereas other emerging markets average rates of economic growth of around 4% with unemployment rates of around 5%, in South Africa, the economy struggles to hold a rate of economic growth of 1.5% whilst demonstrating an unemployment rate of over 30%. The resultant poverty and suffering are a moral outrage that demands the intervention of religious leaders given the paucity of action from the country’s political and business elites.
The reason for South Africa’s poor economic performance, despite its extraordinary natural resources and beauty, its often sophisticated infrastructure, banking system, and technological innovation, its talented and resourceful people, is that the policies of its government are hostile to investment, which leads to the moral affront of the persistence of poverty and suffering.
Two such areas of policies are those that deal with DEI-type quotas in the economy and property rights.
South Africa still has over 100 laws that enforce segregation
Despite the end of apartheid over 30 years ago, South Africa has over 100 laws on the statute books that segregate its people by race. Nominally, these are justified as affirmative action measures to advance black South Africans in the economy. But in practice the most consequential of these laws have served as hard racial quotas that hound skills and capital out of the economy while taxing investment on arrival, promoting rent-seeking and serving as a fig leaf to conceal corruption. Large firms seeking to invest in South Africa may have to surrender a third of their equity for that privilege. The latest iteration of affirmative action laws specify racial quotas to a fraction of a percentage point whilst threatening serious penalties for companies that fail to comply.
If that were not enough to frighten investment away, a new expropriation statute (not a new “land expropriation law” as the JTA report incorrectly describes it) would allow the state to seize any fixed or movable asset from any citizen or investor for less than its market value.
I WAS very encouraged therefore when on February 7 of this year the Trump administration released an executive order that cited threats to property rights and race-based policies as policies that were obstructing South Africa’s progress. Unlike many European nations that indulge these policies despite the extent to which they cause millions of South Africans to continue to live in poverty, Trump’s executive order was the first major move from a global power in the West to influence moves toward substantive economic reform in South Africa.
Subsequently, the Trump administration moved to bring white Afrikaner South Africans as refugees to America, citing that they were discriminated against by the South African government, that their property rights are threatened, and that they are often exposed to horrific levels of criminal violence. My position on that is much more nuanced than your report suggests.
I do not for a moment dispute that South Africa’s Afrikaners are the victims of government neglect. The point I have instead made in the country is that the Americans, insofar as their refugee policy suggests that white South Africans are unique in suffering such abuses at the hands of the government, are wrong.
Millions of black South Africans occupy vast tracts of high-value agricultural land that they do not own because South Africa’s government, despite its protestations in favor of land reform, continues to deny them title to that land. This is a civil rights abuse as egregious as any faced by white landholders.
Likewise while farming communities face a rate of criminal attack in their homes at a multiple of the rate for the broader society (your report claims that “although the farm attacks have persisted for years, they represent a small percentage of the country’s high violent crime rate, which affects all parts of the population,” which is a false implication), I have made the point that black commercial producers are equally the victims of such attacks.
I have also long made the point drawn from polling data that on key issues the opinions of black and white South Africans are virtually indistinguishable when it comes to values that underpin those opinions – values that align very closely with the center-right Christian conservative voting base in America. My view on the refuge question is therefore not that the policy is misguided, let alone that “I have changed my tone,” but instead that America is missing the opportunity to build bridges to the great South African majority of center-right Christian conservatives, black and white, who equally suffer abuses under its government and who equally deserve the support and protection of America. To nurture this alliance is a great moral imperative, which can alleviate the poverty and suffering of millions of South Africans, and provide the United States and the free world, including Israel, with an important regional ally in a dangerous world.
It is an old leftist trope that South Africa’s problems can be read across a stark racial divide – let alone be resolved by old leftist ideologies of expropriation and state directed economic strategies. Contemporary South Africa has moved very far beyond that.
The American administration in Washington is correct that the South African government needs to secure property rights and jettison DEI-style racial quotas to secure the foreign and domestic investment necessary to stage an economic recovery. The Americans are further correct that it would be largely pointless to commit heavily to a relationship with South Africa in the absence of such reforms, given that its low growth rate and high unemployment rate would, in time, likely conspire to trigger a populist collapse of that country’s democracy.
The only strategic error of judgment in the American policy is that it fails to properly grasp the extent to which black opinion aligns with white and the opportunity therein to build a thriving new partnership with South Africa.
The writer is the chief rabbi of South Africa.