AfriForum does not speak for the farmers of SA, says Omri van Zyl, the CEO of agricultural sector body Agri SA. "The farmers can speak on their own behalf," he says. This is what they were doing in a series of ground-breaking meetings with President Cyril Ramaphosa and members of the ANC top six when US President Donald Trump fired off a belligerent tweet about the plight of white farmers in SA. The tweet, which AfriForum promptly welcomed, was informed by statements it made to US politicians and the right-wing TV channel Fox News during a recent lobbying trip to the US, to the effect that white farmers were being massacred and their land seized by a racially driven government. "Our position is that South Africans need to solve their own problems," says Van Zyl. "We are here, and we know what's going on in agriculture." Adding fuel to the firestorm provoked by the controversial right-wing Afrikaner interest group is a list it has published of 195 white-owned farms it claims have bee...
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