How Pretoria handled Trump's toxic tweet
Ramaphosa’s office says remarks are ‘misinformed’
The government swiftly hit back at Donald Trump after a tweet by the US president on the land expropriation debate in SA was said to have helped derail the rand’s recovery. In his first mention of SA on Twitter since becoming president, Trump said he had asked his secretary of state Mike Pompeo to "closely study the South African land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers". He has previously used the social network to threaten the governments of Iran and North Korea, and to attack the US’s own intelligence services. The comment was said to have been one of the factors behind the rand’s reversal of a recovery which on Wednesday had it jump the most in more than a month.
It shed these gains on Thursday, dropping about 2% after some traders said Trump’s comments had raised the spectre of potential US sanctions against SA. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office said the comment was "misinformed". The department of international relations & co-oper...
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