Trump's criticism of South Africa's violent crime crisis receives unexpected local support
JOHANNESBURG — South Africans welcomed President Donald Trump's highly critical Oval Office statements Wednesday about killings in the country, according to analysts.
The President showed video clips and gave South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa a sheaf of news clippings he said show farm murders.
Many believe this "ambush" by President Trump toward the South African leader is good for the country, because it throws a sharp light on the darkness that is the high level of killings in the country, and how President Ramaphosa's government is said to be failing to adequately tackle it.
Approximately 6,953 people of all races were murdered in South Africa in just the last three months of 2024, according to police statistics. That is 76 people on average killed every day.
Additionally, killers are literally getting away with murder. It was reported that between 2019 and 2022 only 12% of murder prosecutions resulted in a conviction.
"President Trump's focus on violent crime in South Africa is a strong positive to emerge from the Oval Office meeting," analyst Frans Cronje told Fox News Digital.
Cronje, president of the Washington-based Yorktown Foundation for Freedom, added, "South Africa has averaged an intentional homicide rate of around 40 homicides per 100 000 residents since becoming a democracy in 1994."
He continued, "the global figure is nearer 4/100 000. More people are murdered in South Africa annually, with its population of just over 60 million, than across the entire Western world, with its population of almost a billion people."
At home, the South African government has been harshly and repeatedly criticized for not tackling violent crime effectively. Cronje said, "The South African government has failed the people of the country in not taking the blight of criminal violence seriously, and external U.S. pressure to address the violence as a precondition for any major investment treaties is pressure that domestic South African activists may employ to address their government's neglect."
Analyst Max Meizlish told Fox News Digital, "It's clear that decades of corruption in South Africa have hollowed out the state's ability to provide even the most basic services — from reliable water and electricity, to a functioning police force and equal protection under the law."
Meizlish, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, added that in the election here last year, "the ANC lost its national majority for the first time since the end of apartheid." The African National Congress (ANC) government took power in 1994.
"The Ramaphosa government is devoting more time and resources to courting BRICS allies like China, Russia, and Iran, than to restoring order at home.
"President Trump is right to demand change from Ramaphosa on everything from land reform and human rights abuses to South Africa's growing alignment with America's adversaries," he stated.
Perhaps off script, right inside the Oval Office last Wednesday, Zingiswa Losi, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, spoke out about other serious crimes going virtually unchecked. "There is no doubt about it that we are a violent nation," she told President Trump and the others crammed into the room. She added, "if you go into the rural areas where (there is a) Black majority, you would see women, elderly, being raped, being killed, being murdered."
Losi continued, "And the problem in South Africa, it is not necessarily about race, but it is about crime. And we think that we are here to say, how do we both nations work together to reset, to really talk about investment … to really address the levels of crime that we have in our country. "
Sources say that after previously refusing to let Elon Musk bring his Starlink satellite communications system into South Africa, citing the need for local partial ownership, Ramaphosa and his advisors have now realized that Starlink's data services could help bring greater security, particularly to rural areas of the country.
In crime statistics for the first three months of this year released on Friday, which critics say are not verified independently, the Police Minister claimed five of the six people killed on farms were Black, and one was White.
However, with little effective police protection in the cities, and even less in the rural areas, a Black farmer's comment sums up the worries of many South Africans today. Standing at the funeral of a rural White farmer, he said to an Institute of Race Relations representative "Although he's White, we don't look at the color. We are doing the same thing. Next time it's going to be me."
Fox News Digital reached out to the South African government for comment, but they did not respond.
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