By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The first group of White Afrikaaners to take up US offer stood in line to check in at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport on Sunday night.
The US has granted refugee status to 49 white Afrikaner South Africans, who could arrive as soon as Monday in Washington DC, where they will be welcomed by government officials.
A total of 54 individuals initially applied for asylum, but five were red-flagged due to criminal records. The decision, which has stirred both support and outrage within South Africa, comes amid growing concerns over the legitimacy of their claims, as critics argue that South Africa does not meet the conditions that would warrant refugee protection for any ethnic or political group.
Transport ministry spokesman Collen Msibi said 49 individuals were set to leave from Johannesburg’s main airport on a chartered flight at 8pm.
“The application for the permit [to land] said it’s the Afrikaners who are relocating to the USA as refugees,” he said. The flight was bound for Washington’s Dulles International airport and then to Texas, he added.
Relations between South Africa and the United States have nose-dived this year over a range of domestic and foreign policy issues, culminating in Washington’s expulsion of Pretoria’s ambassador in March.
Dirco said in a statement: “It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy; a country which has in fact suffered true persecution under apartheid rule and has worked tirelessly to prevent such levels of discrimination from ever occurring again.”
The latest Constitutional Court judgment means that Afrikaners who will take the US refugee status offer would remain South Africans.
According to the 2022 census, white people made up 7% of the 63 million population, about half of them Afrikaners, while black South Africans accounted for 81%.
Donald Trump, along with his South Africa-born billionaire adviser Elon Musk and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have repeated the allegations that white South Africans are being discriminated against.
Trump’s February executive order referred to “hateful rhetoric and government actions fuelling disproportionate violence against racially disfavoured landowners”.
In 2018, during his first presidency, Trump also magnified the unsupported claim, popular globally with the far right, that white farmers in South Africa are being murdered at disproportionately high rates.