Why Is the US Funding This? The Real Story Behind the Afrikaner Crime Grant
The United States is weighing a $1 million grant to research crime against Afrikaners, first reported by Newsday and traced back to a wider ProPublica investigation. The money is tied to Lex Libertas, founded by former AfriForum Deputy CEO Ernst Roets, and sits alongside a separate US decision to end PEPFAR funding to South Africa. Underneath both stories lies a deeper problem: South Africa’s own police statistics and Afrikaner advocacy groups cannot agree on basic numbers, not because anyone is hiding a crisis, but because nobody has ever settled on what to count.
Newsday reported this week that the United States Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, a State Department office with a long history of funding human rights work in oppressive countries, is considering a $1 million grant for research into crime against Afrikaners. The group first lined up to receive it is Lex Libertas, founded by Ernst Roets, who left his role as AfriForum’s Deputy CEO to build it. Lex Libertas is currently raising funds to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in Washington, commemorating attacks on South African farmers.
Newsday article here: United States wants to fund research on crime against white Afrikaners in South Africa
The ANC-led government’s position has not changed in years. There is no racially targeted crisis, and claims to the contrary are exaggerated.
The Newsday report traces back to a ProPublica investigation published on 17 July, which found the Afrikaner grant sits inside a much larger shift at the same bureau. A political appointee named Samuel Samson has been central to that shift, describing his work in Europe as part of a shared civilisational struggle. Under his influence the bureau has proposed funding for a British free speech organisation and $40 million for an anti-communism foundation. The Afrikaner grant follows the same pattern, part of a broader redirection of the bureau toward causes aligned with the current administration’s priorities.
Roets, for his part, has framed his ambitions well beyond a single grant. Since leaving AfriForum he has launched the Pioneer Initiative, a think tank pushing for Afrikaner self-governance and decentralisation away from the national government. He has said publicly that South Africa is already living the consequences of race based policy that Western nations are now flirting with themselves, positioning the country as a cautionary example for an international audience.
The grant is not an isolated gesture. Weeks before the Newsday report, Washington confirmed it is permanently ending PEPFAR funding to South Africa, the HIV programme that has put over $8 billion into the country since the Bush administration and helps treat 8 million people living with HIV, the most of any country on earth. A Senate aide briefed on the decision said officials cited unmet conditions including ending Black Economic Empowerment, reducing ties with Iran, and addressing the “Kill the Boer” chant, adding that none of the conditions had anything to do with health.
Underneath all of this sits a data problem neither side has resolved. The ANC-led government does not hide farm murders inside general crime figures. The Police Minister reports a farm murder count every quarter in Parliament. What changed was that the SAPS stopped publishing a continuous, standalone farm murder series in 2007, making long-term comparisons difficult.
The deeper issue is definitional. AfriForum’s farm murder count focuses on owners and people in supervisory, management or control positions, not general farm labourers. For the quarter from October to December 2024, that produced eight confirmed murders. In March 2025, then Police Minister Senzo Mchunu, since suspended, responded that the SAPS’s statistics for that quarter showed only one farm murder, a farm owner. In a later briefing that May covering the same quarter, he gave a different total of 12 farm murders, a figure that only reaches that level once general farm workers are included, a group AfriForum’s own figures were never counting. Neither of Mchunu’s numbers actually answers the question AfriForum was asking.
In that same May briefing, Mchunu was challenged over claims of a coordinated campaign against white South Africans and disclosed a racial breakdown for the quarter. Two murdered farm owners were African, as were two farm employees and a farm manager. One murdered farm dweller was white.
The gap extends beyond farms entirely. Statistics South Africa’s household survey can break most categories of crime down by population group nationally. For murder specifically, the survey recorded only around 25 cases out of 21,000 sampled households in a typical round, too few to disaggregate by race at all. The lowest level of detail available is by gender.
Three separate gaps sit on top of each other. AfriForum and the SAPS count different things under the same name. The SAPS has given conflicting totals for the same three months. And the one national survey that could settle the broader question runs out of statistical power before it reaches race. No government agency, advocacy group or research body has ever produced a race disaggregated national murder count for South Africa.
That is the real story behind the American grant. It is not proof of a hidden crisis, and it is not proof the claims are false. It is proof that three decades on, South Africa still cannot answer its own question, on either side of the argument.
