When President Cyril Ramaphosa told parliament and the nation that the work to build the kind of nation envisaged in the Freedom Charter — which he described as the cornerstone of the constitution — would have to be done in the context of a “rapidly changing world”, he could have hardly imagined the incredible velocity of the changes he was talking about.
Barely 24 hours later, US President Donald Trump had made good on his earlier threat and signed an executive order forbidding all federal departments and agencies from providing “foreign aid or assistance” to South Africa.
The order further, and ludicrously, provides for the “resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation”.
South Africa — a young democracy universally held up as a beacon of hope for having broken free from the clutches of apartheid without plunging into a bloody race war — is now effectively being accused of ethnic cleansing.
Without bothering with the “further investigation” he promised when he first made the claim that Pretoria was treating “certain classes of people VERY BADLY” and confiscating their properties, Trump has marked South Africa out as a human rights abuser and rogue nation.
The executive order references the Expropriation Act, signed by Ramaphosa into law a few weeks ago, as evidence South Africa is seizing “ethnic-minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”. This despite the consensus in legal circles and the political mainstream — including those who have been vocal in opposing specific aspects of the legislation — that the law does no such thing.
Clearly, there was never any intention to objectively — and independently of fringe white nationalist groups such as AfriForum and Solidarity — probe the veracity of the land-grab fears.
The clue to the Trump administration’s real motive lies in the following statement in the executive order: “In addition, South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the US and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.”
The order goes on to say the US cannot support the Ramaphosa government in “undermining” US foreign policy, “which poses national security threats to our Nation, our allies, our African partners, and our interests”.
Keen Trump observers say he is a shrewd dealmaker who uses high-pressure tactics, including making outrageous threats, to force opponents to the negotiating table with his own predetermined outcomes in mind.
If that is what is at play here, his move against South Africa may be calculated to put the Ramaphosa administration on the back foot, forcing it to scale back its vocal support for the Palestinian cause and give up on its mission to use international bodies such as the G20 — of which South Africa holds the rotating presidency — to champion the interests of the Global South.
Even without the new GNU partners, Ramaphosa’s cabinets sometimes degenerate into cacophony — with different ministers publicly expressing views that contradict those of their colleagues, or even those of the president
That is certainly how Ramaphosa appears to see Trump’s game plan, judging by his measured but firm reaction to Trump’s interventions during his state of the nation address on Thursday, in which he said the country would not be bullied and promised to send envoys to the US and elsewhere to explain the country’s position.
But if Ramaphosa thought he could smooth out his differences with Trump during a round of golf, it should have dawned on him by now — as is becoming clearer to the rest of the world — that in his second coming Trump is the emboldened president of a superpower determined to impose its will upon what he considers to be inferior nations.
Appealing to the sensibilities of people who have Trump’s ear — including South African-born Elon Musk, the world’s richest man — has major limitations when these same people share Trump’s view that affirmative action to redress apartheid’s legacy is “racist”.
The reality is that the new administration in Washington stands diametrically opposed to all that the South African constitution enjoins its citizens to work towards. Hence US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s tantrums after learning Pretoria is using its current G20 presidency to promote “solidarity, equality and sustainability”.
“In other words,” Rubio cried out on X the other day, “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and climate change”.
Of course, none of this is surprising in light of what has been happening in the US since Trump’s re-election. Among his appointments is Darren Beattie as undersecretary for public diplomacy. His role, according to US publications, involves overseeing the bureaus of education and culture, as well as “participating in foreign policy development”.
Yet this is a man Trump fired as a speech writer in 2018 following a CNN report revealing he had been one of the speakers at a white nationalist gathering. CNN had also previously reported that Beattie sang the praises of a scientist accused of suggesting black people were less intelligent than white people, saying he was “the greatest living American scientist”.
Two years after being fired, Beattie posted on social media that the “high point” of the Trump presidency in the first term was his statement about “shithole countries” — an apparent reference to Africa and other poorer parts of the world.
South Africa, therefore, has a steep mountain to climb in forging a workable relationship with the Trump administration.
Ramaphosa on Thursday evening expressed optimism the impasse could be overcome if South Africans stood together and “[spoke] in one voice in defence of our national interest”. He probably made those remarks because he felt emboldened after his largest partner in the GNU, the DA, came out firmly in defence of the country and publicly refuted Washington’s distortions of the Expropriation Act’s import — even though the party itself has serious reservations about aspects of the legislation.
But given we are a little more than a year away from the next local government elections, and taking into account that both the ANC and the DA tend to resort to inflammatory language to reassure their constituencies that they remain fiercely opposed to each other, can this “speaking in one voice” hold?
Even without the new GNU partners, Ramaphosa’s cabinets sometimes degenerate into cacophony — with different ministers publicly expressing views that contradict those of their colleagues, or even those of the president. Most recently, we saw this when planning, monitoring & evaluation minister Maropene Ramokgopa announced the ANC had struck a deal to do away with certain provisions of the National Health Insurance legislation, only for this to be denied by one of her ANC colleagues, health minister Aaron Motsoaledi.
Such mixed messages lead to policy confusion and general uncertainty, which, in the context of the “rapidly changing world” Ramaphosa spoke about, could severely harm the country’s interests.
If the president is to succeed in preventing Trump from interfering in our domestic politics and defending South Africa’s right to pursue a foreign policy not always in line with that of the US, he’ll have to put more effort into persuading all his government partners to own GNU policy as a collective.
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