“South Africa has officially suspended all American businesses within South Africa also stopped the exporting of minerals to the United States of America (sic),” reads an X post published on February 16, 2025.
It adds: “This comes just a few days after Donald Trump cut off all funding from the US to South Africa and the USAID to South Afrika (sic).”
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Screenshot of the false post, taken on February 19, 2025
Shared more than 12,000 times on X, the post includes pictures of Trump and his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa.
The same claim has been shared thousands of times on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and blogs, and is also circulating widely in French.
The posts emerged after South Africa’s mining minister Gwede Mantashe suggested a freeze on mineral exports to the US.
“If they don’t give us money, let’s not give them minerals,” Mantashe said on February 3, 2025, during an address at an annual summit known as the African Mining Indaba (archived here).
Mantashe made the remarks a day after Trump announced he was cutting off all future funding to South Africa because the government was “confiscating” land and “treating certain classes of people very badly” (archived here).
Trump was reacting to a bill signed by Ramaphosa in January 2025 giving South African authorities the power to expropriate property without compensation in certain circumstances (archived here).
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