The father of tech billionaire Elon Musk is working on a project to provide refugee status in Russia for South African farmers, he has told AFP, in a project similar to one by the US government.
The initiative would resettle 50 families from the white Afrikaans minority, descendants of the first Dutch settlers, according to a Russian official. The same group of South Africans have been offered refugee status by the government of US President Donald Trump, which has falsely claimed they face persecution under the post-apartheid government.
Nearly 5,000 white Afrikaners have entered the United States as refugees since Trump took office in January last year and all but halted refugee programmes for every other group.
The US programme has angered the South African government which denies any discrimination. Contacted by AFP by telephone on Tuesday, Errol Musk told AFP from Moscow: “It’s about providing refugee status to South African farmers.”
– 50 families –
Musk, who regularly visits Russia and attended an April 12 Orthodox Easter mass in Moscow in the presence of President Vladimir Putin, did not give details of the project.
In an interview with Russian media Gubernia 33, he justified the project by claiming white Afrikaner farmers were being targeted for murder, allegations strongly denied in South Africa. Washington made similar claims in its justification for encouraging Afrikaners to resettle in the United States.
The governor of the Vladimir region which borders the Moscow region, Aleksandr Avdeyev, said last week that he had discussed the project with Musk. “We discussed the development of agriculture and the prospects for settling 50 Dutch-origin families from South Africa,” he said on Telegram.
While Afrikaners have been emigrating to Russia since at least 2018, according to reports, Musk’s involvement appears to be new information.
Now in his late 70s, he is a polarising figure. In an interview with CNN late last year, he rejected there had been racial oppression under apartheid, a harsh system of segregation which denied the black majority basic rights. Elon Musk, who left South Africa in his late teens, regularly accuses the government of racism, particularly over its failure to grant his Starlink internet provider a licence.
In a new outburst on social media this weekend, he said: “South Africa won’t allow Starlink to be licensed, even though I was BORN THERE, simply because I am not Black!”
South African laws designed to rebalance apartheid-era discrimination require large companies to be at least 30-percent owned by people from previously disadvantaged communities.
Elon Musk was peddling “lies and disinformation”, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesman responded on X.
