In a way, President Cyril Ramaphosa owes Donald Trump big time. The American president made some truly ignorant statements about South Africa last Sunday. “The leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things ... they’re taking away land, they’re confiscating land, and … I will be cutting off all future funding ... until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”
The government hasn’t confiscated any land at all but the attack was meat for Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address on Thursday. “We won’t be deterred,” he said to applause. “We will not be bullied.”
We shall see. It was the highlight of an otherwise typically fanciful Ramaphosa Sona, riddled with references to apartheid, inclusive growth, new and even “blended” funding models, a capable state (a stale old Ramaphosa promise), more than a trillion rand of new money to be magicked over us, a sparkling digital future, whole new phases of reform, expansions of “support” for whatever, new teams on water and local government, and a delegation “to the world” to explain ourselves.
Hubris is an ANC speciality. The “confiscation” of Afrikaner land by the government is a straight lie but our assault on Israel, through the International Court of Justice, for its destruction of Gaza after Hamas attacks inside Israel in October 2023, has now landed us on the wrong end of a gun held by the most powerful country on earth. The problem? Probably less Expropriation Act and more Israel.
Trump on Friday followed Ramaphosa’s Sona vainglory by signing an executive order offering Afrikaners special refugee status into the US and excoriated Pretoria for what his order called “aggressive positions towards the US and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide … and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military and nuclear arrangement”.
This, in case you might not immediately appreciate it, is what Afrikaans speakers call “groot kak”. These are not yet full sanctions but the Americans have the clout to cut us off from the World Bank and the IMF and other development finance institutions they fund or control. And what US company would invest here even now? Did we ever get the $8.5bn for our energy transition?
Ramaphosa’s delegations to the world to explain South Africa’s positions in foreign and domestic policy are a bit late. Trump won’t meet them and neither will his secretary of state, Marco Rubio. You also have to assume that the ground has shifted under US investments here, from carmaking to IT and exports from citrus to wine.
Unless Ramaphosa is able to move quickly, which would be unusual, we are just a breath away from real US sanction and our trade privileges under Agoa, just for a start, are probably gone; our hopes of getting off the global anti-money-laundering watchdog’s grey list probably gravely imperilled. What US official would put hand up for SA now given what their boss has just done?
The US assumes presidency of the G20 group of nations from South Africa at the end of the year. It was all supposed to be a seamless diplomatic triumph for Ramaphosa, but not any more
A fight with SA poses no risk at all to Trump. Some ANC leaders though might be in danger under the US Magnitsky Act, named for a lawyer tortured and killed by our allies, the Russians, while acting to protect the investments of a campaigning US investor, Bill Browder. It originally targeted the people directly involved in his arrest but is now used more widely. If I were former minister Naledi Pandor, who is close to the Hamas leadership, I’d move fast to protect my foreign savings.
All of this was avoidable but both the ANC and Afrikaner representative groups such as AfriForum, convinced they are the victims of their own stories, have made constructive domestic and foreign policy impossible. Afrikaner groups have for years been looking for ways to find some sort of accommodation with the ANC. A group under the Solidarity umbrella has been talking to the Thabo Mbeki Foundation about ways for black and white nationalists to live more comfortably together. AfriForum, which has been campaigning for years in the US for help against what it absurdly claims is a white genocide on farms, is a vital part of Solidarity.
Now we are at the doors of tragedy. Trump’s claims have already set South Africans against each other.
Clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right … But don’t kid yourself. The US is capable of making life here really unbearable should it choose to. Ramaphosa recently claimed he could do a deal with Trump and that he would also invite him on a state visit here. And now? The US assumes presidency of the G20 group of nations from South Africa at the end of the year. It was all supposed to be a seamless diplomatic triumph for Ramaphosa, but not any more.
Trump, though, is a reckless confidence trickster and is capable of contradicting himself at any given moment, so nothing is impossible. But in 30 years of South African democracy I doubt we have ever been in bigger trouble.
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