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At a time when our nation is becoming increasingly polarized, media often ignore viewpoints and stories that are worthy of attention. American Thought Leaders, hosted by The Epoch Times Senior Editor Jan Jekielek and his reporting team, features in-depth discussions with important thought leaders on key issues facing America—and Canada, the world—today.

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] President Donald Trump has recently criticized the ANC-led government of South Africa for what he says are state-sanctioned, racist policies that have been endangering white farmers.

In this episode, I sit down with South African businessman and entrepreneur Robert Hersov to get a read on what’s happening in the country. What is the real story surrounding white farmers in South Africa today? What role have Iran and Russia played in the region? And what can we expect from U.S.-South Africa relations moving forward, after the confrontational meeting between Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa last month?

“In South Africa, we have two farm attacks a day, two murders of farmers a week. And of those farm murders, 20 percent of them involve rape and torture,” says Hersov.

“Cyril Ramaphosa went back to South Africa and proclaimed his meeting as a huge victory,” says Hersov. “I think America is about to unleash serious punishments—not on South Africa, but on the leaders.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Rob Hersov, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you, Jan. Great to be here, all the way from Cape Town.

That’s right. Something very significant happened today. Israel has launched a series of attacks, preemptive attacks against Iranian nuclear facilities, but also against Iranian leadership, nuclear and otherwise, and by all accounts, has had a pretty profound impact. A lot of the Iranian leadership has been actually removed. Now, it strikes me that there’s probably an impact here for South Africa. What do you see happening here?

There is an impact, and it’s a very interesting one. The African National Congress [ANC] has been receiving money from Iran to fill up its poorest financials. They were bankrupt. And all of a sudden, they had more than enough money to pay their bills, pay their salaries, but also launch the ICJ [International Court of Justice] case against Israel. And the ANC has been relying on Russia and China, but very much Iran, to keep it afloat financially and to have this sort of support required on the international stage.

South Africa is one of the top 10 countries to vote against America in the United Nations on almost every occasion. And having Iran out of action, certainly for the time being, if not permanently, will be a big blow for the ANC, because their main patron that’s been paying them now has definitely got other things to worry about.

Let’s go back to this recent meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa and President Trump. Cyril Ramaphosa wanted to reset the relationship with America. Of course, we know all about the President playing some of the significant actions taken against South African whites and so forth and confronted him in this very public way. How is this reset going? And also, does this change? I mean, this sounds like a profound change from what you’re saying in terms of what the ANC is going to do. Does that affect this reset idea?

When Donald Trump announced tariffs across the board on countries and then said, you can see I’m serious, I’m going to put tariffs on everyone, reciprocal tariffs, but you’ve got 90 days to come and see me and negotiate trade deals. And I think 70 countries turned up very quickly to negotiate trade deals with America. South Africa was very slow to move. And South Africa’s interest in meeting Donald Trump didn’t seem to be to talk about trade and tariffs. It seemed more to be, as you put it, to reset the relationship.

Cyril Ramaphosa, in my view, went to see Donald Trump to try to explain that South Africa is a sovereign nation. We can do what we like. We have a constitution. We have a democracy, and if we’re going to implement laws like expropriation without compensation, black economic empowerment, and other laws, we have every right to do so. And you, America, need to understand what we’re doing and respect it. That was Cyril Ramaphosa’s intention.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is not at all impressed with South Africa, and I understand that entirely. South Africa has voted against America in the United Nations on a highly consistent basis. South Africa has been in bed with Russia, China, and very much Iran, enemies of America. South Africa has been very anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, launched the ICJ case against Israel, funded by Iran, and has done everything possible to poke America in the eye and upset America. And I think on a bipartisan basis, Democrats and Republicans, America has had enough.

Donald Trump decided, when Cyril Ramaphosa came to the White House, to not do what I call a Zelensky on him directly, but was actually very intelligent in how he approached his meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa. He didn’t directly attack the ANC or Ramaphosa, but he showed on the television with the famous dimming light. He showed on the television screen a minority party with almost 10% of the voting population, 60 million people, 6 million South Africans, to extrapolate the number, who support the EFF.

Donald Trump showed a video of 100,000 people, red berets, jumping up and down in a football stadium, singing, kill the Boer, kill the farmer. What Donald Trump was cleverly trying to do was to say, listen, Mr. Ramaphosa, I’ll show you the respect of you being here to try and talk to me about resetting the relationship. But how the hell can this happen in your country?

And just to finish this thought, in South Africa, we have two farm attacks a day, two murders of farmers a week, and of those farm murders, 20% of them involve rape and torture. So that was Donald Trump’s message to him. So you want to reset the relationship? Well, how can you allow this to happen in your country?

That’s a fascinating explanation of what happened. But what has been the impact? Has there actually been a positive impact? Has there been a reduction in farm attacks?

No, there hasn’t been any decrease in farm attacks. Cyril Ramaphosa went back to South Africa and proclaimed his meeting as a huge victory. In my view, it was a farce. And South Africa did not come out of it looking at all good. Donald Trump did. And there’s been no concrete action yet from America on South Africa. But the ANC has been trumpeting it as a great success. We told Donald Trump, you’re a sovereign nation, we know what we’re doing, he should leave us alone. But there’s been no discussion on trade and tariffs, certainly not outside the boardroom. We may not know what’s going on behind the scenes.

And if anything, I think America is about to unleash serious punishments, not on South Africa, but on the leaders, the ANC leaders, the MK [uMkhonto weSizwe] party, the EFF [Economic Freedom Fighters] party, and on the anti-American and racist and socialist policies. I think that’s coming. And as you know, Congressman Ronny Jackson of Texas is putting together a bill, which will go to Congress and then to the Senate, which will be to sanction individuals in South Africa who’ve been guilty of those crimes. And that’s underway.

Let’s unpack this whole issue of both farm attacks and then farmer murders. Can you unpack this whole picture for me? Like what has been happening and where do things stand now?

In the year 1994, when we went from white minority rule peacefully to democratic rule and Nelson Mandela came in as our first president, we had 80,000 commercial farmers. We have 30,000 commercial farmers today. So there’s been a huge amount of persecution, pressure put on South African farmers. And it’s not just white farmers, predominantly white.

White people make up 7% of South Africa’s population. It used to be 20% in 1994. We’re now 7% of South Africa’s population. But white farmers own 22% of the arable land. And so there’s a lot of posturing by the Leftists, by the ANC about the whites controlling all the farmland, the whites controlling all the land.

It’s not true. They’re highly productive, the farmers, not just white farmers, but they are being victimized, targeted. And the EFF’s hate speech, kill the Boer, kill the farmer, one settler, one bullet, and let’s slit the throat of whiteness, has a direct impact on farm attacks. So farm attacks spike after these rallies. They spike after this hate speech.

And just to tell your viewers one more thing, our highest court deemed that those utterances, kill the Boer, kill the farmer, one farmer, one settler, one bullet, was not hate speech. Well, if that’s not hate speech, I don’t know what is. But I can tell you right now that our judiciary is compromised. And I’m not surprised that an ANC-compromised judiciary came out with that ludicrous conclusion.

Before we go there, tell me a little bit about Julius Malema and the EFF. I mean, if 10% of the voting population are behind this party, this is obviously a serious party in the country. What are they about? And I mean, on the face of it, the speech sounds about as extreme as it can get.

Julius Malema was head of the ANC Youth League. He’s a highly intelligent populist and opportunist. I’ve actually met him at a lunch meeting and he made enormous sense. He’s highly intelligent and he’s very dangerous, but he’s an opportunist. When he left the ANC, he founded the Economic Freedom Fighters. His party has nothing to do with the economy and nothing to do with freedom.

But his popularity as EFF, amongst the voters, has been declining and declining. And he recently, in the last four months, lost most of his top lieutenants who left the EFF and joined Jacob Zuma’s MK party. MK stands for uMkhonto weSizwe, which is Zulu for the Spear of the Nation. They were the armed element of the ANC prior to 1994,prior to the democratic elections.

Jacob Zuma was the president of South Africa from 2008 to 2017, preceding Cyril Ramaphosa. And Jacob Zuma has reappeared just before the 2024 elections, where the ANC lost their majority for the first time in 30 years. Jacob Zuma reappeared to compete in the elections with this new party called MK. So I’ll just give you the layout so the viewers can follow this.

The ANC has had a majority in South Africa since 1994. In 2024, they lost the majority. They dropped from 56% to 41%. The next biggest party at 21% is the party that I would support, which is the Democratic Alliance [DA]. The Democratic Alliance is probably the Judeo-Christian, free market, pro-West, pro-America, free enterprise party. They’re kind of centrist. They’d be more Democrat than Republican, but let’s call them centrist in South African terms.

And the Democratic Alliance has grown from almost obscurity, only controlling Cape Town in 1994, to controlling the whole of the Western Cape and numerous other large metros and pieces of other provinces. And it’s not just a white party anymore. It’s obviously at 21, 22%. It’s got a lot of black, Indian, and colored voters.

And for your viewers, colored is a mix of white and other races, black and other. So ANC at 41%, Democratic Alliance at 21, 22%, Jacob Zuma and the MK party at 15% and Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters at around 8%, just under 10%. And then a lot of smaller parties at the 1, 2, 3%. And it’s the first time our country has had a coalition government. The ANC is the anchor tenant, and the Democratic Alliance is the main opposition, joining the Government of National Unity [GNU].

That’s where we are today. And in the meeting with Donald Trump, Cyril Ramaphosa dismissed the EFF as a minority irrelevant party, but with just under 10%. That’s not much of a minority. That’s a lot of people singing, kill the Boer, kill the farmer. And it’s a very worrying situation. So while we don’t have genocide, we don’t have extermination right now, the word that’s been bandied around, we have a lot of elements that could lead to something like that in place already.

As someone who’s studied this issue quite a bit over the last 25 years, I can say that this sort of extreme incitement to violence, in this case, killing, transparently, is an element of that journey to mass killing. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s a very absolutist statement. And I suspect that this is what you’re alluding to here.

It’s already begun on the farmers. You are three times more likely to be killed as a South African farmer than a policeman, and as a policeman twice as likely to be killed as an average citizen. Cyril Ramaphosa said to Donald Trump, South Africa is a violent country. Lots of murders, lots of rapes, lots of terrible things happen. The farm attacks are nothing special. Well, that’s not true. If you’re three times more likely to be murdered as a farmer than as a policeman, there is something wrong. And these attacks on the farmers spike after the hate speech.

So Cyril Ramaphosa is not only out of touch, but he lies. And if you look at the definition of genocide, there are 10 elements in the definition. Number nine out of 10 is extermination. There isn’t extermination; I accept that. But there’s denial, there’s racial classification, symbolization, dehumanization, persecution, and organization. A lot of these elements are in place. They haven’t lit the ovens, yet.

You’re telling me that the coalition government actually has, you know, the party that you support, which you believe is the centrist party of reason, isn’t this changing anything?

It is. But if you look at the allocation of ministerial positions in the government, we have 32 cabinet ministers and we have two deputy ministers. We have 75 ministers altogether, all with security and blue lights and flying business class everywhere. Huge waste, huge expense. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make.

The point I’m trying to make is that the Democratic Alliance, when they were negotiating with the ANC for their ministerial positions, foreign affairs, treasury, finance, any of the key positions that affect economic growth, ideology. And, you know, we’re one year into our coalition government, first time in 30 years, and they’re finding their feet. But the ANC is still trying to push forward their racist and socialist ideology.

And the coalition is only just now working out how to say no, how to coach the ANC ministers on talking to coalition partners and agreeing on things before they announce them. It’s finding its feet. Anyone who’s looking from a distance will say democracy is working in South Africa. And it is. We have free speech. The fact that I can speak as openly as I do would not be the case in Iran, China, Russia, and many other countries. I’d have disappeared by now or been taken out.

But I can speak freely in South Africa. We have free speech. Democracy is working, but it’s working very, very slowly. And our next national election is in 2029. And I’m not sure our economy is going to make it till then, for a start.

Now, you said something quite strong. You said that there are racist policies in place. And so explain to me why you believe that.

There are 140 race-based policies in South African law. And the vast majority, 114 of them, were introduced since 1994. And many of them are definitively anti-white. They may be written as supporting or benefiting previously disadvantaged people. But when you read between the lines, they are fundamentally anti-white. They’re racist.

We also have laws, black economic empowerment. It all started off as a good thing where everyone accepted previously disadvantaged, which, by the way, meant all different black tribes, colored people, and Indian people needed to be empowered in the economy. And everyone bought into that. Corporations and white people said this is a good thing. We need to help the previously disadvantaged.

What that has turned into is trillions of rand that have been looted from the government and forced through black economic empowerment to benefit 100 elite families. So if you are a colored South African, an Indian South African, not a loyalist to the ANC, or from a different black tribe, you just aren’t black enough for black economic empowerment. It’s been mafia-style looting, breaking and looting at the most sophisticated level.

Essentially, what you’re saying is that there is obviously this modicum of freedom that you’re describing. But at the same time, the policies, even with this coalition government, which is presumably already somewhat more moderate, basically the economy is still being driven into the ground and you’re expecting chaos to reign if that actually happens.

That is 100% right, Jan. You’ve nailed it. People say to me, hang on, Rob, you’ve got a coalition government with a centrist group like the Democratic Alliance. How come expropriation without compensation, the most damagingly named bill you could ever imagine, has been signed into law under its watch? Well, the reality was the whole thing had been pre-prepared by the ANC beforehand, and all Cyril Ramaphosa had to do was sign it.

The opposition parties weren’t part of the coalition at that point, and it was forced through, as were so many other laws, quickly, in time. Now that the coalition’s in place and they’ve gained the courage to say no to the ANC, the racist and socialist ideology that’s being forced upon South Africa is being slowed. But there are elements that people need to be aware of.

I’ll give you a very interesting example. When the ministries were being debated and handed out, Helen Zille, who’s the chairman of the Democratic Alliance Federal Council and a real lioness of South Africa, an extraordinary woman, said to me an interesting thing. She said, for some reason, the ANC won’t let us come anywhere near the Department of Foreign Affairs, which is known as the Department of International Relations and Cooperation [DIRCO]. They won’t even give us a deputy director, a deputy minister.

We found out why. Because the Islamists in the ANC, funded by Iran, wanted to control foreign affairs so they could put forward the ICJ case against Israel, send a really nasty Islamist as our ambassador to Washington, who then publicly called Donald Trump a white supremacist and a racist. And America said, you can go back to South Africa then. The Islamists of the ANC have controlled the Department of Foreign Affairs.

In addition, during the ANC’s reign, all of the state-owned enterprises, the Electricity Supply Commission, Transnet, which is the rail network, the ports, South African Airways, were all captured by the state. Any position of power in any state-owned enterprise, including down to municipal and town level, where a budget was involved, were given to loyalists, or what they called cadres. In South Africa, they call them cadres, but I know it’s a cadre. So they put loyalists who were mostly incompetent into positions of power, positions of influence, and they captured the heights of the economy and the heights of democracy.

I’ll give you two statistics that will horrify you. Our country is growing at less than 1% GDP and has been for the last five years. It’s barely growing. And our population growth is at 2%. We’re getting poorer every year. Our fixed investment is 15% of GNP, whereas an emerging market should be 25%. We are being de-industrialized, and every single one of our state enterprises is bankrupt.

Here’s the worst one of all. Our official unemployment rate is 33%, but we have a youth unemployment of 60%, the worst in the world by far. And this is 100% as a result of the ANC and its racist and socialist policies. It has failed South Africa, failed all of the people of South Africa, and it’s very, very worrying.

Very prominently, a number of white South Africans came to the U.S. as refugees. And can you just kind of explain to me what happened there? And does that make sense to you?

Those are economic refugees. There is economic genocide taking place thanks to the ANC. And these are people that have absolutely no hope of making a life in South Africa and have taken up the offer from America to come to America as refugees. They just don’t look like the refugees that most people have in their minds, you know, worn down, dirty, desperate. But they are. They have no chance in South Africa.

And, you know, we have racial policies that restrict people’s ability to get jobs, to get into sporting teams. We have sporting quotas all the way down from our national team to school teams. And it’s insidious. It’s malevolent and insidious. And I don’t blame these people for taking up the offer. I think some of them are economic opportunists who want to get to America for a better life. But isn’t that what a refugee is? Someone who’s restricted from achieving their potential but can find it somewhere else?

It just strikes me from everything you’re telling me that a great many blacks are also being restricted in effect.

So the farm owners are not just white farmers. The DEI, anti-meritocracy, is not just putting a glass ceiling above white people. It’s colored people, Indian people, and a lot of black people who are being restricted in their opportunities because the ANC is just rewarding their loyalists. If you’re loyal to the ANC, part of their mafia organization, if you’re getting money and giving money, you benefit, but no one else does. And the positive of this, Jan, which I think you’re going to get to, you’re getting there, so I’ll just jump in front, is that the voting population is working it out.

In 1994, the ANC swept to power with a vast majority of the country. Today, a lot of the ANC voters who believed in the ANC, voted for the ANC, and expected great things from the ANC, which they got, by the way. From 1994 to 2008, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and the ANC delivered results. The country grew. There were employment opportunities and meritocracy. The ANC did a very good job. And I respect people who voted for the ANC from 1994 to 2008.

In 2008, Jacob Zuma came in, and the rot set in rapidly. And Cyril Ramaphosa, he’s been almost as bad, if not worse. So I say to the voters who voted for the ANC in the beginning, I respect your decision. You were right. But those voters are seeing what’s happening and realizing the ANC has become evil and only looks after a very small group of people. And they are moving away from the ANC to a point where I think in 2029, the ANC will drop below 20%. It will cease to be relevant, which means the voters aren’t stupid, but they move very slowly.

Could you explain to me, there’s been a lot of debate about this, the reality of that image of the cars lined up and the crosses that Trump referred to as the burial sites of white farmers? Can you explain to me what that is?

That’s not the burial site. The crosses along the road are a representation, a manifestation of the murders. Each cross represents a farmer murdered, of all colors, but it’s not where they were buried. Most of them are buried in the towns and on the farms where they were. There’s also a hill, Plaasmoorde Kopi, which is a farm murder hill, where there are crosses all over the hill, going for kilometers. And that again is a representation of the murders and not where the people are buried.

So even though he said these are the burial grounds, this is not true. But the image was so powerful. And it does explain exactly what has happened. So he got that detail wrong, but the story was right. You know, farm attacks are horrific. They are happening, and they’re way out of proportion to the normal population. He was right on that front.

So how many farmers have been killed ultimately?

Let me put this in perspective. America has 3 million commercial farmers. South Africa has gone from 80,000 to 30,000 commercial farmers. If you take the number of murders between 2000 and 2024 as a percentage of the 30,000 and extrapolate that to a percentage of the American commercial farmers, you would have had over 250,000 American farmers murdered between 2000 and 2020. There are two farm murders a week. And this has been the trend for the last 20 years.

You also said that somehow with this inciting language, which is a bit more recent, that’s accelerated?

That song, they call it a liberation song, but it’s inciting language. It’s been around for a long time, since before 1994. But it’s now being used in stadiums as a war cry for the economic freedom fighters. Now, you mentioned EWC, expropriation without compensation. Everybody thinks when they hear it that it’s entirely to do with land, but that’s a red herring.

Most disadvantaged South Africans aren’t looking for farmland. What they really want is a decent home close to a city or within a city where they have the opportunity to get a job. It’s urban housing they want, not land. But land sounds like such an emotive issue that the EFF, ANC, and MK are using that, getting the statistics wrong about who owns what. And that’s creating all the emotional excitement.

But expropriation without compensation, apart from scaring away every foreign direct investor that would ever look at South Africa, expropriation without compensation is about land, mines, banks, companies, houses, and the watch off your arm if it’s in the public interest. And Cyril Ramaphosa says we’re unlikely to ever need this law, then why have it? It’s like a loaded gun on the dressing room table with children running around. It will be used at some point.

Rob, you have your critics as well. And one of the things that they do say is that basically you’re kind of adding fuel to the fire, so to speak, right? Exacerbating these divisions that exist. And how do you respond to that?

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What’s Behind the Killing of White Farmers in South Africa? | Rob Hersov