In a post on X, the United States (US) State Department announced that it had pulled South Africa’s HIV and AIDS funding on account of the South African government not doing enough to protect white farmers. According to the X account, “Trump Admin Yanks South Africa’s AIDS Funding After Government Failed to Protect White Farmers.”

A few points must be made clear.

The first is that South Africa is a sophisticated middle-income economy that could easily finance its own social and welfare programmes if its government “yanked” counterproductive policies that hound out investment and growth. In addition, recall just how much money is looted annually out of the healthcare system. US taxpayers should not be footing the bill for what South African politicians are stealing and that the country, if its economy were well run, could easily finance. At this newspaper we cannot understand that hardworking Americans, if they knew what was really going on, would tolerate such a waste of their hard-earned tax dollars.

The second is that South Africa’s farmers face a crippling criminal onslaught and are attacked in their homes and businesses at a rate far higher than that of the broader population, and the South African government is responsible for this both through allowing incitement and in being loath to provide effective security services to farmers.

What the US announcement gets wrong is to pit black and white South Africans against each other on these issues – almost as if to say that if the whites are attacked by the blacks, then the blacks must be punished by having their drugs cut off (itself a deeply problematic framing). It is stupid and reveals an amateurish understanding of the country. The US may be a deeply polarised society, with Americans pitted against Americans on almost every issue of substance, but that is not South Africa.

On issues of governance, South Africans across all lines of politics, race, and class are in broad agreement on what needs to be done to turn the economy around and provide better services to people. Should destructive racial preference policies be jettisoned in favour of policies that grow the economy and create jobs? The great majority of South Africans, black and white, Democratic Alliance and African National Congress, will agree. There is even majority agreement that the US would be justified in pulling its healthcare funding.

On farm killings, the US gets it wrong to think this is a problem suffered by whites. There are black commercial farmers too. And they are also attacked, tortured, and executed in their homes. In the country’s rural heartland, black and white relations are much better than what is imagined in Washington.

Doubt that?

Well, this newspaper, together with the Social Research Foundation, has polled the most divisive farm killings issue of all, the chanting of the murderous slogan “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer”. Between seven and eight in ten South Africans, black and white, say it is an abomination that has no place in a civilised society.

The common values and decency of its people are South Africa’s greatest strength. It is a Christian, conservative society in the main. US policy should be playing to that strength. Where the US does the opposite, South African institutions of influence, regardless of political persuasion or history, should come together to make plain that the broader society rejects the black-vs-white framing as both wrong and dangerous – lest their silence allow the impression to develop that South Africa is as pitted against itself as the US announcement would appear to imply.