Fasten your seatbelts even tighter; this is going to be one hell of a bumpy ride given the madman at the helm.
Donald Trump took his oath of office as president of the US only a few weeks ago, yet he has wreaked untold havoc with his utterances and social media posts already.
The world should shudder at the mere thought of him following up his rhetoric with deeds.
Our country has not been spared. The maverick declared in a tweet that he was going to suspend aid to South Africa because we are supposedly ill-treating a certain class of people and taking “their” land.
You could not make up this stuff even if you tried a million times. Yet we know that his words were music to the ears of some South Africans, those the madman termed a “certain class of people”.
They probably have a hotline to the Oval Office, where they are now guaranteed an audience without two brain cells to rub together and have latitude for whatever drivel they can think up.
Our sin was to do what sovereign states do the world over: sign into law a bill intended to benefit all of SA’s people, not just a “certain class of people” who have enjoyed living off the fat of the land for centuries while shutting others out.
It was at the behest of this “certain class of people,” who are now in the wild imagination of the madman and his ilk ill-treated, that the African in this part of the world was robbed of their land and birthright for centuries.
The Expropriation Act of 2025 that President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted just the other week is a valiant if partly flawed piece of legislation aimed at helping right the wrongs that “a certain class of people” visited on the majority in SA.
It replaced an apartheid-era law that was used to further the aims of the “certain class of people” to help themselves to vast tracts of land in pursuit of the goals of the Native Land Act of 1913, which declared 87% of the land, prime land, out of bounds for more than 80% of the people of this land because they were black.
We applaud President Ramaphosa for standing up for his country and telling Trump off for his attempts to meddle in the affairs of a sovereign state.
If it takes such people as Trump withholding aid, isn’t it time to rethink strategy and, better still, capacitate ourselves to a level where it wouldn’t matter if such aid is cut?
And what is the actual value of such aid if it comes with strings attached, threatening our very sovereignty?
What we need to do, and unashamedly so, is to build our state, aligning with those blocs that share our vision of a just world order.
Truly speaking, the US has hardly been a supporter of the struggle of the Africans on this part of the continent, or anywhere else for that matter.
It will do us nothing but a world of good to unhinge ourselves from the madness in the White House and its imperialist and, frankly, racist take on matters globally.
The madman will always lend a sympathetic ear to what the unpatriotic fellow South Africans will whisper to him.
We can’t bank on him. His grasp of geopolitics is at best juvenile and very dangerous.
We doubt he even has any idea where South Africa is on the map. For him, the S in BRICS, a real threat to US and Western hegemony, stands for Spain. Go figure.
