The United States has laid out five steps it wants South Africa to take as Washington ramps up pressure on President Cyril Ramaphosa's government. Ambassador to South Africa L. Brent Bozell III said Washington presented the South African government with five requests aimed at resolving some of the disputes that have strained relations between the countries.
The five points provide one of the clearest indications yet of what the Trump administration wants from South Africa as relations between the two countries have deteriorated. Newsweek contacted the office of President Cyril Ramaphosa for comment and is awaiting a response. Writing in an op-ed published by the U.S.
Embassy, Bozell said South Africa had "more or less dealt with" the first two issues but sharply criticized its handling of the remaining three. It comes after Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed visa restrictions on certain South African nationals over policies the Trump administration says enable race-based discrimination, uncompensated land seizures or the incitement of violence. Bozell said the first request was that South Africa not obstruct U.S. efforts to process Afrikaners seeking refugee status in America.
He said Pretoria gave Washington assurances in January that it would not do so. The second concerned land expropriation, with Washington asking South Africa not to carry out uncompensated land seizures. Bozell said the matter had also been addressed because the Expropriation Act is undergoing judicial review.
The remaining three demands concern some of the most politically contentious issues in South Africa. Washington wants Ramaphosa and other senior government officials to condemn the "Kill the Boer" or "Kill the Farmer" chant, designate rural crime as a priority crime and establish and fund a plan to combat it, and extend alternatives to Black Economic Empowerment ownership requirements for multinational companies operating in the telecommunications and mining sectors. Bozell said Ramaphosa had responded formally to President Donald Trump, but criticized Pretoria for not doing enough to address the final three requests.
However, Bozell's op-ed does not explicitly state that meeting all five demands would automatically result in the visa restrictions being removed. Rubio announced the new visa policy on September 15 under a provision of U.S. immigration law that allows the Secretary of State to deem foreign nationals inadmissible if their entry would have potentially serious adverse foreign-policy consequences for the United States. The State Department said the restrictions would target foreign nationals responsible for or complicit in laws or policies that enable uncompensated land seizures, race-based discrimination or the incitement of imminent violence against members of minority racial or ethnic groups.
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