John Steenhuisen corrects Trump's ‘white genocide' claims
Agriculture minister and DA leader John Steenhuisen dismissed US President Donald Trump's claims of a genocide against white afrikaners.Steenhuisen was part of President Cyril Ramaphosa's delegation visiting the White house in Washington.What was intended to be a meeting aimed at mending diplomatic ties between South Africa and the United States took an unexpected turn when Trump played video footage showing EFF leader Julis Malema chanting 'kill the farmer.'In response, Steenhuisen clarified to Trump that the EFF is an opposition party and does not form part of the South African government.
'The two individuals that are in that video are both leaders of opposition minority parties in South Africa – Umkhonto weSizwe under Mr. Zuma and the Economic Freedom fighters under Julius Malema. The reason that my party, the DA which has been an opposition for over 30 years, chose to join hands with Mr. Ramaphosa's party was precisely to keep those people out of power. We cannot have those people sitting in the union buildings and making decisions.'
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Daily Maverick
3 hours ago
- Daily Maverick
Ramaphosa to have second meeting with Trump at G7 Summit in Canada
The President said he would also have meetings with the chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, and the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney. President Cyril Ramaphosa says he will have a meeting with US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the Group of Seven (G7) Summit in Canada at the weekend. Speaking to reporters in Pretoria on Tuesday, Ramaphosa said he would also have separate meetings with the chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, and the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney. The G7 Summit will take place in Kananaskis, Canada, from 14 to 17 June. Canada, which holds the G7 presidency, invited Ramaphosa to the meeting. The President told reporters that attending the G7 was a 'great opportunity' from which Pretoria expected 'good outcomes'. 'I'm hoping that when we meet the various other leaders of various countries who are part of the G7, we'll be able to interact meaningfully with them.' He said the G7 Summit gave Pretoria the opportunity to 'propagate' its message about its G20 presidency and the 'great outcomes' it wanted to see in November. The US will take over the presidency of the G20 from SA after the summit. 'We're going to use it as a platform to begin to consolidate what we want to achieve in November when the leaders' summit takes place here [in Johannesburg],' Ramaphosa told reporters. — Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦 (@CyrilRamaphosa) June 10, 2025 Ramaphosa's second meeting with Trump will take place three weeks after he met the US president in the White House on 21 May. The meeting followed months of worsening diplomatic ties between Washington and Pretoria, and false claims from Trump about a white 'genocide' in South Africa. 'Our visit to the White House was a moment where South Africa set out to reset the relationship with the United States, and I do believe that we have achieved that. 'Many people were very critical of our going there, and some were even saying we were going cap in hand and what-have-you — we were not. Some were even suggesting that we were summoned. We were not summoned. In my telephone conversation with President Trump two weeks earlier, I said, 'I want to come and see you', and he immediately conceded to that and later gave us a date. So that is not summoning. It is us taking the initiative that we want to go and see him,' said Ramaphosa. He stressed that SA did not 'go kowtowing' to the White House, but went with the aims of resetting US-SA relations and beginning 'serious engagement' with the US, particularly regarding trade and its participation in SA's G20 processes. While in the US, Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Parks Tau had proposed a wide-ranging trade deal to his counterpart, the US trade representative, spanning areas including gas, agriculture, automotive and minerals. Ramaphosa's spokesperson last week said that SA was awaiting a response to this proposal. 'Right now, there is engagement that is taking place between the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition and the Department of International Relations, so we've opened the way for us to engage seriously with the United States,' Ramaphosa told reporters. He added that the discussions on trade matters were 'now under way'. In his three-hour working visit with Trump, Ramaphosa had made the point that the US had been at the forefront of creating the G20, and so it would be important for Trump to be present when Ramaphosa handed over the G20 presidency to the US in November this year. 'Of course, the other [reason to go to the US] was to demonstrate the importance of President Trump coming to South Africa for the G20, and he immediately conceded that, yes, the G20 without the United States — who originated the G20 process — is not so effective as it is with the G7. He's going to the G7; I expect him to come to the G20 here. 'For us, it's important for us as a nation to reposition ourselves in the very turbulent geopolitical architecture or situation that we have, and that is why it was important to go to the United States,' he said. DM
Daily Maverick
3 hours ago
- Daily Maverick
Trump has manufactured a national crisis that could come to define his presidency
Protests in Los Angeles over ICE actions are the lead national news story. So far, there is no prospect that the crisis is at an end. Meanwhile, the Trump administration decided on a show of military strength — but has no plans for an endgame to the crisis. 'Never let a good crisis go to waste' is a cynical view of politics attributed to Winston Churchill — and repeated by other politicians ever since. What we are now learning is that US President Donald Trump has added a far more cynical setup line: the best crises are the ones you create yourself to further your political purposes. The Trump administration essentially manufactured a national crisis over immigration — with ground zero in Los Angeles — and is now using the resulting protests to support his outrage and precipitate actions. To address a series of demonstrations in Los Angeles, he ordered the dispatch of a contingent of US Marines there and the call-up and federalising of some 4,000 National Guard personnel, wading into the ongoing crisis in Los Angeles and putatively setting up a way he could take the credit for stilling the demonstrations. For bonus points, this would set up the landscape for blaming California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — both Democrats — if events go off the rails before the crisis winds down. The Trump administration, of course, has had a long-running feud with Newsom over the handling of major forest fires and the distribution of crucial water resources, and with Los Angeles over its apparent inability to move quickly enough to save neighbourhoods destroyed by the fires. Some officials close to the president have muttered about arresting the California governor over his behaviour and words; meanwhile, the governor is suing the federal government and its chief executive for arrogating the state government's powers. It might — might not — be a coincidence, but Trump seems to see Newsom as a likely challenger for the Democrats in 2028's presidential election and damaging him would be good, albeit cynical, politics. The flood of illegal immigrants/undocumented aliens into the US and the presumably damaging impact on the economy, jobs and the general welfare was a key element of Trump's reelection campaign in 2020. Throughout that effort, he cited imaginary numbers of millions of immigrants (and those mythic Haitians eating pet puppies and kittens). Once in office, he has insisted upon more dramatic enforcement of arrests and mass deportations. This has reportedly included giving ICE — the Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security — quotas of several thousand individuals a day to be rounded up. That led to vigorous efforts to round up suspects in factories and restaurant kitchens, or at the parking lots of big-box hardware stores where handymen, bricklayers, plumbers and electricians congregate, waiting for contractors to hire them early in the day. This, in turn, has led to increased fears among those whose papers were not in order. In the newest wrinkle, while not directly related to the ICE roundups, but contributing to the fear, the Trump administration has issued a total freeze on visas to enter the US for a range of nations. (The recent anti-Semitic attack in Boulder, Colorado, carried out by an Egyptian immigrant apparently served as a pretext for the move, although Egypt was not, curiously, on the list of affected nations.) Crowd control In Los Angeles, a rising number of people — immigrants, their family members, and supporters, including labour union leaders — rallied to protest against the ICE roundups. The protests initially centred on the part of the city that housed federal government office buildings, including a major courthouse. The Los Angeles police were called out in force to protect the buildings and exercise crowd control, but without ending the demonstrations. While the protests seemed rowdy, they were, at least initially, largely non-violent. As events moved on through the weekend, some in the crowd threw water bottles, stones and firecrackers at police, several Waymo autonomous vehicles were set alight, and there was some damage to fixed property. Not surprisingly, the protests received blanket coverage on news channels and in other media, and the potential of wider violence was presumably the precipitating cause for the Trump administration's thinking in seeing a path for action, even though city and state authorities — acting in close coordination — insisted they were well-practised in crowd control and had sufficient human resources to deal with the situation. The Trump administration seized the moment, however, and announced, without any collaboration with city and state authorities, that they would call up 2,000 National Guard troops. They then doubled that number. In addition, they deployed a substantial detachment of Marines to Los Angeles — even though using the Marines for law enforcement is illegal. For his part, Trump said these deployments were crucial lest the city be 'burning to the ground'. One surely must wonder why Trump did not move with the same alacrity in the insurrection in Washington, DC, at the Capitol Building in January 2021 in response to his false claim that he had been cheated of victory in the presidential election. One major problem in this was that the call-up of the National Guard was done without consultation with the state government, under which control of a state's National Guard units resides. The normal process is for a state governor to call upon units in times of major natural disasters or civil disorder, as with Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans a generation ago. Elements of the California National Guard were called to duty in the rioting that took place in 1992 in the wake of the police assault on Rodney King, but not precipitously at the whim of the president. 'Insurrection' As a final resort, if the need arises, a president can federalise National Guard units to call them to service in civil duties, especially in the event of an insurrection or foreign invasion, according to the law. (Trump has kept up the drumbeat of using the word 'insurrection', probably to provide backstopping of the federalising and mobilising of National Guard troops.) Historically, perhaps the most extraordinary version of such things took place in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower federalised the Arkansas National Guard over the objections of the then governor to enforce the desegregation of that state's public schools, in accord with the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v Board of Education. Arkansas had failed to heed the court's ruling, and its governor egged on increasingly violent anti-integration demonstrations. More generally, over the past several decades, National Guard and regular Army/Navy/Air Force reserve units have been integrated into the defence department's table of organisation. Such units have been called to serve abroad in military activities as partners to regular active duty forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is important to note that National Guard personnel have usually been well-trained in dealing with civil disorder, demonstrations and protests. Accordingly, making use of such personnel is not, in and of itself, a terrible choice. This writer enlisted in the Maryland National Guard back in the early 1970s in an infantry unit — to stay out of the military draft that would have certainly sent him to Vietnam. After basic and advanced infantry training, his training unit spent a full week rehearsing the ins and outs of anti-riot duty techniques not based on using lethal force. (We alternated in being riot control troops and rioting students — the verisimilitude was compelling.) Such training had been put into place for those in National Guard units as a consequence of the killings at Kent State University in 1970 by poorly trained Ohio National Guard troops who used live ammunition, as well as the killings of several other students at a college in South Carolina the same week. At the time of writing, it seems the demonstrations in Los Angeles have continued, but at a lower level of intensity. However, demonstrations in support of the protests in Los Angeles have been set for more than a dozen cities across the nation. This movement is not at an end. Disconcerting week All this has been taking place during a particularly disconcerting week for Trump's presidency. There was the raucous, wild, childlike breakup with his heretofore 'Dogester' partner, Elon Musk. Concurrently, there is growing dissatisfaction with the 'Big Beautiful Bill' of tax cuts and government spending, not least from Musk, who called it an 'abomination'. It has become increasingly clear that this Bill, if passed by the Senate after a narrow victory in the House of Representatives, would give major tax cuts to the rich and cuts in a range of social services to the less well-off, triggering a massive increase in the nation's debt. As a result, the president's push for this Bill is becoming more frenetic, yet less certain of results. Meanwhile, there is growing criticism of the plans Trump has pushed for a major military parade to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army. The massive parade is scheduled to take place in Washington, DC, on Saturday — which just happens to be Trump's 79th birthday. Moreover, those highly touted Trump initiatives to reach a chimerical, quick, easy solution to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the continuing ferocity of Israel's actions in Gaza, have left Trump with no victories to celebrate, despite his promises. As a result, looking bloody-minded on immigrants, with a tough, military-style crackdown on protests against ICE's round-ups of potential visa violators and other illegal immigrants, could be spun as a win for Trump, despite the rest of the depressing news. It could conceivably be touted as yet another campaign promise kept. Of course, the demonstrations across the US could mushroom instead. Casualties might mount, and increasing disapproval from civic leaders, some Republicans, judges, and many Democrats could be heard, along with a swathe of lawsuits against the president's policies. The crisis of the protests over immigration policy is not over, and if it goes badly it might come to define the Trump presidency. DM
TimesLIVE
6 hours ago
- TimesLIVE
Ramaphosa names 31 'eminent people' to champion national dialogue
President Cyril Ramaphosa will be calling a national convention on August 15, which will set the agenda for the national dialogue. Ramaphosa also announced the appointment of an eminent persons group of 31 people, who he said will guide and champion the national dialogue and act as the guarantors of an inclusive, constructive and credible process. In an announcement on Tuesday, Ramaphosa said the national convention will represent the diversity of the South African nation and will be a representative gathering, bringing together government, political parties, civil society, business, labour, traditional leaders, religious leaders, cultural workers, sports organisations, women, youth and community voices, among others. 'Through their various political, social and other formations, in their workplaces, in places of worship, communities, villages and sites of learning, South Africans will in the months following the national convention be encouraged to be in dialogue to define our nation's path into the future,' Ramaphosa said. The views, concerns and proposals that will emerge will be brought together at a second national convention, planned for the beginning of next year. Ramaphosa said there was broad agreement that given the challenges the country was facing at the moment, the national dialogue should be convened. 'The idea of holding a dialogue is not a new concept in our country. In many ways having dialogues is part of our DNA as a nation. At every important moment in the history of our country, we have come together as a nation to confront our challenges and forge a path into the future in dialogue with one another.'
