South African President: Don’t ‘Instruct’ Us To Arrest Those Chanting Death Threats To Whites

Asked why his country would not arrest blacks who chant “Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa answered that his country did not need to “be instructed by anyone” to take that step, asserting that the country’s constitution protected freedom of expression.

Last week, President Donald Trump confronted Ramaphosa at the White House about the threat to whites in his country.  When Ramaphosa claimed blacks in South Africa were also killed by criminals in the country, Trump responded, “The farmers are not black. And the people that are being killed in large numbers, and you saw all those grave sites, and those are people that loved ones are going … on a Sunday morning, they told me to pay their respects to their loved ones that were killed … their heads chopped off. They died violently.”

In late March, Julius Malema, the founder and leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, a communist political party, led a rally at which the crowd chanted “Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!” Malema has also led chants to “cut the throat of whiteness.”

“In 2023, a little under 300 white-owned farms were attacked across South Africa, with 49 people killed in those attacks, according to figures from AfriForum,” NBC News noted.

In 2010, a South African court ruled that the song “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer,” which Malema was using, did constitute hate speech. But in 2022, Judge Edwin Molahlehi reversed the ruling, saying, “It does not constitute hate speech and deserves to be protected under the rubric of freedom of speech – it articulates the failure of the current government to address issues of economic empowerment and land division.”

On Saturday, Malema defiantly said, “The struggle heroes composed this song. All I am doing is to defend the legacy of our struggle. Therefore I will never stop singing” the song. “That will be a betrayal to the struggle of our people.”

“When it comes to the issues of arresting anyone … it’s a sovereign issue,” Ramaphosa stated. “It’s not a matter where we need to be instructed by anyone that ‘Go and arrest this one.’ We are a very proud, sovereign country that has its own laws, that has its own processes, and we take into account what the constitutional court also decided when it said that that slogan, ‘Kill the Boer. Kill the farmer,’ is a liberation chant and slogan. And it’s not meant to be a message that elicits or calls upon anyone to go and be killed. That is what our court decided. So they will probably want to arrest people willy-nilly, [but] we follow the dictates of our constitution because we are a constitutional state and we are a country where freedom of expression is in the bedrock of our constitutional arrangement.”

[WATCH] President Cyril Ramaphosa says SA can’t be instructed to arrest anyone for the "Kill The Boer" chant. pic.twitter.com/FtgvtjAXHv

— Newzroom Afrika (@Newzroom405) May 27, 2025

In January, Ramaphosa signed the Expropriation Act 13 of 2024, permitting the government to seize land for public purposes or in the public interest.

RELATED: Trump Confronts South African President In Oval Office Over White Farmer Genocide