JOHANNESBURG: The U.S. ambassador to South Africa has hit out at the country’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, telling Fox News Digital, "You've got a president of South Africa who refuses to condemn an incitement to kill."
Ambassador L. Brent Bozell III was responding strongly, in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, to being summoned this past week to South Africa’s foreign ministry and criticized for ‘undiplomatic conduct."
This is the third time the ambassador has received a démarche — a diplomatic rebuke — from Pretoria in the nine months since he arrived here. The ambassador has been slammed by South Africa for relaying President Trump’s condemnation of South African policies and statements. Bozell is a former Fox News contributor and founder of the largest conservative media watchdog, the Media Research Center.
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He has repeatedly pushed for issues brought up by President Trump in a testy confrontation in the Oval Office with South Africa’s President Ramaphosa 16 months ago to be addressed. Among other points, these include alleged race-based discrimination, allegations of murder and torture of farmers, plans for uncompensated land seizures and the incitement of violence against minority groups.
The ambassador said three of the five specific ‘asks’ the Trump administration wants have been ignored by South Africa.
High up the list of ‘asks’ is President Trump’s demand that President Ramaphosa stops people in South Africa from shouting "Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!" A Boer is a white man, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. It defines it as "a South African of Dutch or Huguenot descent". Ramaphosa has claimed he can’t stop people chanting this slogan because it’s been cleared for use by the country’s supreme court.
Bozell told Fox News Digital, "You've got a president of South Africa who refuses to condemn an incitement to kill."
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He added, "You've got a government that has said it's not going to do any more for the Afrikaner rural community, and it's got a government that's saying no, your mining has to go through race-based programs. We're not going to allow your investments to go the way everyone else has been allowed to go".
"Those were three strikes and you're out as far as we were concerned," Bozell said.
"Ask 100% of the world if "kill the farmer!, kill the Boer" isn’t hate speech," he continued. "If that isn't hate speech, I don't know what hate speech is: inciting people to commit murder. So the answer we've gotten is, well, the court said it isn't. To which our response is look, in the United States, the president can disagree with the court and does about every five minutes because that's what you do in a democracy when you disagree with something."
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Bozell added, "So, to say, well, you can't do it because the court said it's not, you know, that's poppycock. If President Ramaphosa, if he wants to, he can do it. It's just as simple as that."
The ambassador pushed hard on the point, saying "How hard is it to say this chant, where some, where people do it, 50,000 people in the stadium jump up and down, pantomiming guns, shooting people, how hard is it to say, stop it? This is awful that anybody would be inciting people to kill."
South Africa, analysts say, is drawing ever closer to Iran, Russia, China even Cuba. The African National Congress, the ANC, the party which rules the country in the so-called ‘government of national unity’, has hosted the terror group Hamas.
This is very much on the administration’s radar. President Trump met with Bozell in Washington again recently, with the ambassador telling Fox News Digital the president’s thinking "perhaps most of all, he's concerned about how South Africa has been systematically leaving the non-alignment space and moving closer and closer to our adversaries."
Referring to South Africa, the ambassador added, "There are people who are living in the glory days of the Soviet Union, and they want to go back to the good old days of communism. Why are they still working with Cuba?"
Digging deeper, Bozell asked, "Why are they working with Iran and Hamas terror organizations? What's Russia doing for them? What's China doing for them? This is bad news when they're going in that direction. What we're saying is simply do what you've always done. Have a non-aligned with both sides. We'll live with that."
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The ambassador stressed that the U.S. wants to make dynamic business with South Africa on mining, particularly on critical or rare earth minerals. He stated, "We're not going to do what the Chinese do. They come in, they take the ore, they take it to China, they benefit [from] it and they make a pile of money. We're saying to South Africa, we'll come in, we'll do the mining, we'll do it right there in South Africa."
He continued,"South Africa gets the money, not the Chinese. We bring in the technology that they could never have. We've created hundreds of thousands of jobs. We're saying we could create more and more and more at a time when they desperately need it, but it will be good for us as well. This is the partnership we want."
Elon Musk and his Starlink satellite internet company are one of many U.S. companies which want to enter South Africa. But in the telecommunications and mining fields, the government insists that 30% of foreign company ownership must be given to black local entrepreneurs.
Bozell says this is problematical for the U.S. "There are literally billions of dollars from American firms and American government investments ready to go into mining, but it's not going to go there so long as you have these race-based avenues they must go through. In telecom, Elon Musk has said he will put Starlink in 500 schools and pay for it in perpetuity if he's allowed to go this way. And they said, "No, we want 30% of your company. So yeah, of course it's hurting."
On Friday, a senior official at South Africa’s Department of International Relations – the country’s foreign ministry – confirmed to Fox News Digital that they demarched Ambassador Bozell for a third time, adding, "This is a record. He was called in to explain his undiplomatic conduct. The issues related to the bilateral relations between the two countries are a subject of ongoing discussions. There is commitment from both sides to resolve the outstanding matters. South Africa values the relationship with the USA. It is a mutually beneficial partnership".
Also, Friday, a State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital, "We are not interested in diplomatic maneuvering, procedural delays, or dialogue for dialogue’s sake. The ball is now squarely in the Government of South Africa’s court to outline the relationship it wants with the United States and respond accordingly to President Trump’s executive order."
Still, Bozell looks to the future of the U.S. - South Africa relationship with guarded optimism. "Look, temperatures can go up, but I want their temperature to go down too. You know, we want this partnership. We want to figure this out. It's good for South Africa. It's good for the United States of America. Temperatures need to go down, and we got to figure it out."