FF Plus claims White House officials want ANC to publicly denounce ‘Kill the Boer’ chant

Freedom Front (FF) Plus leader Corne Mulder says President Cyril Ramaphosa and his team were unable to reset relations with the United States (US) government.

Ramaphosa met US President Donald Trump in May, accompanied by businessman Johann Rupert, some Cabinet ministers and South African golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen.

However, Mulder told reporters at the OR Tambo International Airport on Wednesday that Ramaphosa’s meeting with Trump was a failure.

He had just returned from a trip to the US, where he met with US government officials and businesspeople.

“We all took notice of the events in the Oval Office, and we saw that it did not look like a success. Our delegation came back to South Africa and said everything went well, the problem is that no one we met, including the appointments, told us that the meeting was a success.

“On the contrary, they are concerned about what happened and they desperately want to reset relations between South Africa and the US, but there are certain problems that need to be solved,” he said.

Four conditions given to FF Plus

Mulder said he was told that there are four conditions that must be met for South Africa’s relationship with the US to be reset.

The four conditions are:

• To classify farm attacks and crime in rural areas as priority crimes;
• The ANC should publicly denounce the ‘Kill the Boer’ chant;
• Government must ensure that land expropriation happens with fair market compensation; and
• American companies and organisations must be exempt from race-based policies, such as BEE.

“Anyone who thinks that these conditions are a figment of our imagination or that we went and stood outside the White House, no you do that at your own peril. It should be noted that these things are set as preconditions for the normalisation of the relationship between South Africa and the US, the country’s second largest trading partner,” he said.

Who did the FF Plus meet at the White House?

Mulder said his delegation had not gone to Washington to “complain”.

“We met with people from the office of the Vice President; we met people in charge of the National Security Council as well as the Homeland Security Council.

“The current situation is that the current administration has reached out by name to the Afrikaner people, we would be foolish not to act on that,” he said.

Mulder also said he did not view Trump’s involvement with South Africa’s policies as “interference”.

“I do not think the US is interfering with South Africa. If South Africa prefers the US to have nothing to do with South Africa, we should just ignore these four preconditions and it will happen automatically,” he said.

He said he would brief Ramaphosa about his party’s trip to the US.

The Citizen also understands that the FF Plus had a meeting at the US consulate in Sandton after their media briefing at OR Tambo.

Presidency dismisses ‘personal ambitions’ of FF Plus

Meanwhile, Presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya told The Citizen on Wednesday that the FF Plus had gone to the US as non-state actors.

“Our experience is that state actors do not use non-state actors as intermediaries; therefore, the FF Plus visit and subsequent pronouncements will be viewed as nothing more than their personal ambitions,” he said.

Political analyst Ntsikeleo Breakfast told The Citizen that he believes that FF Plus did not go to Washington DC with good intentions.

“I do not believe what they are saying, that the relationship has not been fixed. From my understanding, that issue was fixed,” he said.

More strain in the GNU?

Breakfast said the FF Plus visit to the US further complicates matters for Ramaphosa, who just fired a DA minister for going to the US without permission.

The FF Plus is a partner in the government of national unity (GNU).

“This complicates matters for the GNU. These political parties, they need to work together as a united force and as a team of the GNU. You can’t want to be a member of the GNU and still take a step back and draw swords with another member,” he said.

The Citizen had reached out to both the DA and the ANC, the two biggest partners in the GNU, about claims made by the FF Plus. Their comments will be added once they are received.

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