Another area identified by Mr Trump is property rights. In a move that America’s president seems to have conflated with actual land seizures, on January 23rd Cyril Ramaphosa, his South African counterpart, signed the Expropriation Act, which gives the state new powers to expropriate property in the “public interest”.

Though the name of Donald Trump went unmentioned, everyone knew who Ramaphosa was talking about. A few days earlier, the US president had written on his Truth Social platform that South Africa was “confiscating land and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY”.

South Africa appears to be at a crossroads in its waxing and waning relationship with the US following President Donald Trump's controversial decision last week to cut financial aid to the country. Trump said South Africa was pursuing what he called "unjust and immoral practices" against the white minority Afrikaner community and by filing a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023.