Why do we mock Amerikaners?
It's easy to shrug off statistics and chants if you are not threatened. The governing party is wrong to ignore minority fears.
A group of Afrikaners gathered outside the American Embassy in Pretoria to deliver a memorandum to US President Donald Trump. Picture: Nigel Sibanda / The Citizen
Do we really have to mock people who use an opportunity to leave their country of birth when invited to settle elsewhere?
It's a big, potentially traumatic step for any family. Compassion would not be out of place.
So what if South Africans who have left for the US do not fit the United Nations (UN) definition of refugees?
US President Donald Trump has executive authority to order that the Afrikaners be treated as refugees.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says: 'Refugees are people forced to flee their own country and seek safety in another country.
'They are unable to return to their own country because of feared persecution as a result of who they are, what they believe in or say, or because of armed conflict, violence or serious public disorder.'
To debate whether the Amerikaner trekkers fit this definition is to miss much. So, too, the haggling about whether Trump is correct to describe what's happening in SA as genocide.
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As we know from SA's case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, legal definitions of genocide are complicated. By those standards, Trump is wrong.
Yet SA is objectively a very violent country where the murder rate is consistently among the highest in the world, and racial targeting is a reality.
Folk don't feel protected when the Constitutional Court says whipping up mobs to chant, 'Kill the farmer! Kill the boer!' while emulating gunshots, 'Pa! Pa! Pa!', is not hate speech.
Try to imagine how that looks to the targets, and to the outside world, where President Cyril Ramaphosa's assurances are not persuasive.
It's easy to shrug off statistics and chants if you are not threatened. The governing party is wrong to ignore minority fears.
Ramaphosa thinks he needs to educate Trump. On Monday, he said: '… those who have fled are not being persecuted, they are not being hounded, they are not being treated badly. They are leaving ostensibly because they don't want to embrace the changes taking place in our country.'
In doing so, Ramaphosa perpetuates the ANC myth that anyone who opposes race laws is anti-transformation.
Wrong. One can support transformation while objecting to laws which prescribe that races should be treated differently.
ALSO READ: Afrikaners pawns on Trump's board
Trump's ally, South African Elon Musk, baulks at bringing his Starlink network here because of the requirement that 30% must be given to local blacks.
The ANC does not see racism in existing legislation, including the panoply of black economic empowerment laws, preferential procurement rules and new regulations which make race disclosure a requirement for property transfer.
Indeed, the Employment Equity Amendment Act, which is being challenged in the High Court in Pretoria by the DA, discriminates on racial grounds.
So, too, does the proposed R100 billion transformation fund aimed at supporting blackowned businesses, to the exclusion of others.
This racial preferencing turns off investors and, therefore, impedes job creation. Instead of shaming those who leave, it might be wiser to acknowledge legitimate fears.
If the new Amerikaners could foresee a safe, prosperous future in South Africa for their families, they would not leave this beloved country.
Me? I ain't goin' nowhere.
NOW READ: New race quotas will stifle economic growth
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