President Cyril Ramaphosa arrived at the White House on Friday afternoon with a list of 20 issues to raise with US President Joe Biden. And though he branded the interaction a “fruitful and positive engagement”, it’s not clear how successful it was.
Goodwill there was aplenty. Biden personally guided the delegation on a tour of the West Wing after one of them said they were unlikely to see it again.
Some of Ramaphosa’s officials came away with special White House-branded chocolate-chip cookies and packets of M&Ms.
But the business discussed was serious, as both leaders are set to face tough domestic tests of their leadership in the next few months: Biden in the form of midterm elections, and Ramaphosa at the ANC’s elective conference.
Biden started the meeting by recalling his encounter with Nelson Mandela and again corrected a statement he made on the campaign trail ahead of his 2020 election: that he was arrested for trying to visit Mandela in prison in the 1970s.
“I said I got arrested. I wasn’t arrested, I got stopped.”
Biden said Mandela came to greet him on his first visit to the US, in 1990.
“We met in the Senate foreign relations executive committee room,” Biden said. “And he came in, and we all stood there and said hello to him and the like. And afterwards, he asked to come by my office. And he came by to say thank you, because he heard I had been stopped trying to get to visit him, to see him in prison.”
Ramaphosa acknowledged the US contribution to SA’s struggle during breakfast with Vice-President Kamala Harris, and in his meeting with Biden.
“We appreciate the continued efforts of our friends in the US to overcome the debilitating effects of apartheid and colonialism,” he told a small gathering of Congressional Black Caucus members.
Aspiring congressman Jonathan Jackson, son of anti-apartheid activist Jesse Jackson, was present at the meeting and said that though SA had come “a mighty, mighty long way”, the “heavy lifting” of achieving economic justice and parity was only beginning.
“The young people want it, the young people deserve it,” he said. “There has been massive theft from the land. The wealth of the nation has to be returned.”
Barely four years ago relations between the two countries reached a low over this point, when Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, suggested in a tweet that there were land grabs and “large-scale killing of farmers” in SA.
“Donald Trump must leave us alone. When we were facing apartheid, when we were facing oppression, he was not there, he did not fight side by side with us,” Ramaphosa said at the time.
Later, in a charm offensive on the sidelines of the 2018 UN General Assembly aimed at attracting business to SA, Ramaphosa reported that he had exchanged pleasantries with Trump over a dinner and would engage him on the matter over a round of golf.
That was the last occasion on which Ramaphosa visited the US with such a large delegation, containing at least 10 ministers and scores of businesspeople.
Here in the US we are fixated on the idea of freedom, but I think we have a lot to learn about ubuntu, and I think in particular how South Africa has continued to navigate its challenging past post-apartheid
— Reuben Brigety, US ambassador to SA
For this working visit he took only presidency staffers, international relations minister Naledi Pandor and the relevant diplomats. Ramaphosa and some of the delegation stayed at the five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel, where rooms start at around $500 (R8,800) a night.
It was a last-minute trip at Biden’s invitation after US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s visit to SA last month. The short notice, and cost-cutting, meant the delegation was kept small, Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, told the Sunday Times.
Biden called SA “a vital voice on the global stage and a leader in the international order”, but officials downplayed the prominence of the Ukraine-Russia conflict during the talks.
Yet one of the issues Ramaphosa spoke most strongly about was related to this.
Ramaphosa addressed an intimate dinner with senators on Friday night to lobby support for stopping the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act from becoming law. It was passed by Congress with a large majority, and is awaiting a vote in the Senate.
The law “could have the unintended consequence of punishing the continent for efforts to advance development and growth”, Ramaphosa said.
He stressed that both the US and Russia are important strategic partners for SA.
It is not clear whether Ramaphosa asked Biden to veto the bill, should it land on his desk. “President Biden will choose what he has to do,” Ramaphosa told journalists. “What we have done is express our strong opposition to this.”
The US ambassador to SA, Reuben Brigety, told the Sunday Times that differences over the bill wouldn’t negatively affect relations between the two countries. “I don’t always agree with my wife, but we stay together,” he said.
Brigety explained that the bill still had to go through a number of processes before becoming law. Should Biden choose to not sign it, the bill could still become law by a two-thirds vote in Congress.
He said the US could learn some lessons from SA as a democracy. “Here in the US we are fixated on the idea of freedom, but I think we have a lot to learn about ubuntu, and I think in particular how South Africa has continued to navigate its challenging past post-apartheid. There is something we can learn about dealing with our challenges about segregation,” he said.
Ramaphosa is set to attend Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in London tomorrow and return on Tuesday for the UN General Assembly in New York.
Some of the items on Ramaphosa’s list for Biden:
1. How to create a good environment for the 600 US companies investing in SA, and attract more.
2. SA’s $38bn shortfall for its just energy transition, on top of the $8.5bn it has already secured, so that jobs aren’t lost.
3. Renewing SA’s duty-free and quota-free access to the US market for value-added products under the African Growth & Opportunity Act, amid talk that it should be scrapped in 2025.
4. Asking for more resources for the Southern African Development Community mission in Mozambique to help fight the insurgency in which “South Africa can find itself [becoming] a target”.
5. Lobbying support from the US for an intellectual property waiver on Covid vaccines to cover therapeutics and diagnostics.
6. The dropping of “unfair” steel and aluminium tariffs of 25% and 10% respectively, introduced by Trump in 2018.
7. Infrastructure support.
8. Food security in Africa, with a specific focus on manufacturing fertilisers locally.
9. Not “punishing” developing countries with the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act.
10. Dropping US sanctions against Zimbabwe which damage the economy and drive migrants to neighbouring countries.
11. Getting the AU a seat on the G20, in the same way the EU has one.
12. Assistance with skills development for civil servants.
13. Arranging a gender empowerment summit on the sidelines of the US-Africa Leaders’ Summit in December.
14. Reform of the UN Security Council to grant Africa permanent representation.
15. The Russia-Ukraine conflict.
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