041online

As tensions continue to rise between the United States and South Africa, 041Culture columnist Mvume Ndimba offers his final analysis of the complex, often contentious relationship between the two nations.

This will be my last update on the SA vs USA feud currently brewing on the planet. 

I’ve invested a lot of time and energy into researching this from a cultural and human perspective, and quite frankly I am tired. 

I’ve spent countless hours of company and personal time looking at this from all possible angles asking myself “why South Africa?”

With all the atrocities on the planet, all the death and inequality, why is this beautiful corner of Earth being treated as a target for the United States? 

And the only logical conclusion I can think of, is that they just want to own the country. The same way they took the Gulf of Mexico (now America) the way they want to take over Canada and Greenland, the way they want to own the natural resources of Ukraine, they just want the land we stand and live on, and are employing some more of their famous dirty tricks. 

In order to better illustrate the point I’m making, I need to highlight something very important about Elon and Donald and their.. shall we say “complicated” relationship with the truth. 

We’ll start at the beginning and compare. 

Both claimed to be self-made billionaires who earned their fortune by hard work, savvy business acumen and a knack for investing in the right thing at the right time. 

Community Notes say that’s not even remotely true. Elon’s father, Errol, was a multimillionaire who owned his own jet before he was 30. Musk went to all the best schools, moved to America to study (on his parents’ dime), and when he got tired of school, he took a “small loan” from his father of around $28 000.00 in 2000’s money to start one of his many failed start-ups. 

Trump’s story is quite similar. Little is known of his education background, but those of us who are old enough to remember TVs with the dial thingy to change channels remember the memes and moments of him claiming to have received a “small loan of a million dollars” from his father to start his real estate career. 

When Trump’s father died, Donald inherited a substantial fortune in real estate and assets that his father amassed in his lifetime, automatically making Donald one of the richest men in his city. 

So we’ve established that the two men who preach meritocracy and poo-poo the idea of hand-outs each received a substantial leg up in their respective careers, receiving handouts from their own fathers. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I love the nepotism, why become successful if you can’t pass that on to your kids? But the fact that everything they’ve done in the year of our lord 2025 has been built on the idea that wealth is earned through hard-work is nonsense. 

Moving on to their later careers, to where we became familiar with these men as titans of industry, Musk began his career in the late 90s founding a company called Zip2, which would eventually become PayPal (after he sold it off for another “small” $300 million) 

Using 1.6m of the 300 million he received from selling his company, he invested in Tesla and immediately became a majority shareholder. Taking the seat of CEO and claiming (falsely at the time) to be a founder of Tesla… He still claims to be a co-founder of PayPal as well (which didn’t exist when he sold the company that would go on to become PayPal) He was eventually taken to court over making the claim that he founded both companies and a settlement was reached to give him the right to call himself a founder, that 300 million went pretty far i’d say. 

Now you may be asking… what does any of this have to do with South Africa? 

Welp, What i’m trying to establish is that these men have no problem lying about their upbringing and achievements and throwing money at anyone who can legally prove that they’re lying. They dont operate on the laws that govern you or I, they operate in the court of public opinion. They are narrative guys who see facts as malleable or subjective. So when Trump’s first week in office ended with a head-on collision between a helicopter and an aeroplane, he could get in front of the citizens of his country and blame “diversity” for the accident (although both pilots were white men). 

When South Africa, a nation less than a lifetime removed from apartheid, institutes laws that seek to repair the imbalances of the past, they can claim reverse racism and discrimination, offer refugee status to ONLY white Afrikaans people who are farmers or are aspiring to become farmers, in the name of “equality” while simultaneously kicking out small, brown, Spanish speaking people and making a massive spectacle of it at that. 

So now we’ve built a little profile on our nepo-baby bros, let’s talk about the end game… the real reason I believe two billionaires have taken interest in the country where our number one export is vibes. 

Musk’s entire empire is built off of tech. Everything he has ever achieved was done on a computer, but we dont really think of what computers are actually made of. When we look at what raw materials are needed to make computers, we realise something quite interesting, South Africa is a top 50 exporter of every single raw material… fascinating isn’t it? 

We also have ample land in the country, state-owned and privately owned, with a favourable exchange rate meaning you could build a mega-factory for cents on a dollar, have access to all your raw materials without the costly and time-bound issue of waiting for it to land, clear customs and deliver. 

You have plenty of sunshine to run on solar power and access to a number of large ports to export your shiny new electric vehicles. Labour in our country is relatively cheap compared to what you’d pay overseas, although more expensive than most developing nations, you have a wealth of skilled labour at a cut-rate price at your disposal, should you decide to operate out of South Africa as an international business. If you can manage to get the country to sign up for and use the internet provider running on your own satellites you can control the flow of information in the country. If you own the one app that champions “free speech” you can elevate or push down voices at your will. 

The only problem would be getting that pesky local government to buy in… and I believe that for the first time in our lives, our government might’ve said “no” to a cheque. So now you can flip the TV on and see Kallie Kriel in the US talking to Tucker about the “atrocities” happening in South Africa that are aimed only at white South Africans, you get that tried and true brand of core lies that are propped up by just enough truth that you could straw-man your way out of any scrutiny. 

You have people telling you something is happening and even though you know it’s not really happening, you’re being given so much supporting information you start to question your own knowledge. 

They bring back footage from the 70s-80s-90s and 2000s to further the claim that it is in fact real and the world is not paying attention. You get the situation we’re in now… where the truth is based solely on what one man believes… 

I believe the long game here is to overthrow ANOTHER democratically elected government through more dirty tricks. 

I believe we will see more stories that paint black South African leaders and citizens as hateful, vengeful and ungrateful beneficiaries of unfair legislation that victimises white people exclusively. Although our living aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers can tell us stories about the white families they worked for as “kitchen girls” and “garden boys”

The farm attack stories will continue to appear, ignoring the black victims of these attacks, I believe we will see a massive “event” where black-skinned people will be seen doing atrocious things, even though their language and speech patterns will not match ours, we will be blamed. 

I believe the ANC will be removed from power forcedly, and a U.S familiar government will be installed as “peacekeepers”. 

And on the day this happens, I think we will see the real play here. My personal feelings about the two United States politicians aside, they have a shit-ton of money to invest in long-term investments. They also have amassed a wealth of contacts and connections and I am fully certain that they are funding talking heads right now to “spread the truth” about the situation in South Africa. I believe we are witnessing a coup in real-time, and much like in the past, the majority of us are too busy with our lives to really notice this situation for what it is. A nett loss for all South Africans, white, black and in-between.

However, it isn’t all doom and gloom. Take solace in the fact that these two men, at their core, are dishonest. They can’t help themselves, they speak their will into existence which is not guaranteed to result in their will coming to fruition. I think of the great wall that was meant to be erected between the US-Mexico border which is yet to exist. I think of the AI robot assistants that Tesla was meant to roll out, the underground tunnels that would fix the traffic problem in Los Angeles and the release of the heavily redacted Epstein Files that were meant to be released today. 

And to those who might’ve made it this far thinking I’m reaching or jumping to conclusions, ask yourself why a country that has a history of mistreating its own farmers would import immigrants instead of looking after its own citizens who chose farming as a profession. Just last year the tractor protests in Europe signaled the decline in agriculture as a viable career path and now, Big T’s trade war VS the rest of the world has put their own farmers at risk of losing everything, why would they bring in more farmers when the ones they already have are just about being choked out by red tape and legislature right now? 

This is by far the most fascinating time ever to be alive!