Afriforum thinks farm murders are SA’s George Floyd equivalent

Farm murders are South Africa’s equivalent of a ‘George Floyd’ moment say minority rights group Afriforum.

This after an upsurge in fake news being spread around the USA about the ill-treatment of white people in South Africa.

While the group’s CEO Kallie Kriel condemned the spreading of the fake news, he stressed that the real issues faced by white South Africans were worse, and needed to be highlighted in the same manner that the Black Lives Matter movement against the killing of black people by American police officers.

Images of white people scrubbing floors and being treated like servants were spread by such black American celebrities as Tyrese Gibson, who caused outrage when he shared the images with a caption calling for action against alleged systemic racism. The images came at a time when Afriforum was running its own international campaign calling on conservative-run countries to speak against the murder of white farmers in South Africa.

‘ I think we have had a lot of success but there challenges to overcome such as the double standards we are encountering,” said Kriel.

“The murder of George Floyd is a terrible thing and people should take a strong stance against that, but it still remains a mystery why people won’t take the same stance against the brutal murder of 2-year-old Willemien Potgieter.”

Potgieter’s death in 2011 made shockwaves in the farming community, after being killed in a farm attack along with her parents in Lindley, Free State. Afriforum has been gathering data specifically on how many white farmers were murdered each year, as part of their campaign to highlight them as a racially motivated crimes.

The Institute of Security Studies’ (ISS) CEO Jakkie Cilliers said it was likely that Afriforum and other right wing organisations were behind most of the messaging about white South Africans in the USA.

“I think for several years there has been quite the campaign by right wing groups with this kind of messaging. I can’t remember all of them but Afriforum made a presentation to parliament which incensed a lot of people. So it’s coming from such groups as that which have undertaken to spread that kind of message and try to get people like Trump to comment on it ,which he has now.”

Whether the messaging had a nefarious political campaign behind it or not, groups behind these campaigns had freedom of press and speech on their side. It was only in the improbable case that President Donald Trump takes the messaging to policy decisions around trade that things could get messy, Cilliers added.

“Some effects of this could be that South Africa’s trade advantages are clamped down, for instance as part of Agoa,” said Cilliers referering to the Africa Growth Opportunity Act of which South Africa was a beneficiary, allowing certain trade tariff liberties.

“That could happen particularly when somebody like Trump who has a particular view on the world and that is, I think the worst that could come out of this. Of course it can be quite serious if organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank, which put pressure by making certain conditionalities, especially when you consider that the World Bank for instance is headed by an American and a conservative.”

Simnikiweh@citizen.co.za

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