So what happens now? We manage to host a G20 summit reasonably successfully despite a hostile US boycott. In the run-up, international relations & co-operation minister Ronald Lamola appears on an American TV show and, when invited to, labels US President Donald Trump a white supremacist!
President Cyril Ramaphosa declines to hand over the G20 presidency gavel to the US chargé d’affaires in Pretoria because it’s beneath him, and insists the handover take place at the department of international relations and co-operation.
Trump, stung by the grandstanding, responds by barring South Africa from the next G20 summit, to be held at a resort he owns in Florida. He announces that all US funding to South Africa is being halted immediately.
An infuriated Ramaphosa responds by issuing a quick statement calling Trump’s order “regrettable”, adding that as head of a sovereign constitutional democracy he “does not appreciate insults from another country”. He appeals to the G20 members who did attend the Johannesburg summit to help him out. Cheers all round from the peanut gallery, but the global caravan moves on to a Ukraine peace plan.
And now, a week later, we have nothing. Goaded by Trump into lowering ourselves to his level, the government — normally slow as a tortoise to fix anything — loses its cool and obliges him.
For all their aggression, the US state department and White House want to do a deal with South Africa
Meanwhile, Alistair Ruiters — Ramaphosa’s investment adviser and clearly his choice as ambassador to fill the empty and creaking South African embassy in Washington — was in Johannesburg for the summit. I can only imagine his horror as the events of the past 10 days unfolded. By the end of this week, he was still in the country, at Ramaphosa’s request. For what? Why wait so long to appoint him?
He’s been trying to negotiate a trade deal with the Trump administration for six months now, and while progress has been made on pork and potatoes, he’s nowhere near making a dent in the punishing 30% tariffs imposed by Trump on imports from South Africa.
Yet all our hopes rest on this frustrated and good man. At the age of 61 he is trying to balance a family life in Portugal; a president desperate for daily news; and deep pools of bureaucratic treacle — in the Presidency, foreign affairs, trade & industry, the Treasury, agriculture, mineral resources, Operation Vulindlela and the reform team in the Presidency. He cannot make a single move without clearing it through every tiny wrinkle of the mess that is our government.
When he was informally invited — by the senior White House official dealing with South Africa, Brendan McNamara — to attend a 90th birthday dinner there in September for Gary Player, Ramaphosa advised him not to accept, for crying out loud, because the invitation wasn’t official.
For all their aggression, both the US state department and the White House want to do a deal with South Africa — but we don’t have the skill, vision or the courage to give them something.
Yet Trump’s tantrum, Ramaphosa’s indignation and Lamola’s recklessness aside, this can still all be resolved. What is needed is for the private sector to step up and take the lead.
A few months ago, three Afrikaner figures proposed the outline of a deal that would hugely serve our country and more than satisfy the Americans. They proposed an arrangement where the US would have long-term access to local minerals and they would finance the processing of those minerals here — exactly what the ANC has been bleating on about for three decades.
Their proposal was that this would all happen around Saldanha, but it could be spread to anywhere in South Africa with a port and a functioning railway line. Ruiters knows exactly which minerals US companies need from us, but the only way to get the government out of the way quickly is for business to agree on a deal and then take it to Ramaphosa.
Our big banks and leading industrialists need to form a US trade initiative. Johann Rupert must lead it; Standard Bank’s Sim Tshabalala must lead it; miner Neil Froneman must lead it. Get Ruiters and local US business leaders on board and take a plan to Ramaphosa by the beginning of February. If he still can’t stomach not being in total, absolute control, then we can give up.
Because if you really believe that a few more nuts and avocados getting into China or that vaccinating our cattle against foot and mouth is going to make any difference to our lives in the next decade, you’re deluding yourself. We run a trade surplus with the US and that’s the result of a century of co-operation — and it’s still worth fighting for no matter how bad things look now.
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