President Cyril Ramaphosa will be taking the risk of his political life when he meets US President Donald Trump in Washington on Wednesday. It’ll be their first meeting since the beginning of Trump’s second term in the White House in January, when he almost immediately began a furious assault on South African “transformation” policies, including land expropriation and BEE, along with almost entirely false claims of systemic discrimination against white Afrikaner farmers.
The Trump administration’s verbal offensive reached a climax this past week as 59 Afrikaner “refugees” were picked up by an American plane in Johannesburg and flown to Dulles International Airport near Washington. They will be granted US citizenship. Ramaphosa, barely able to hide his contempt, called them cowards and reminded us that after 1994 whites have been “allowed” to remain in the country.
When leadership is this inelegant you have to ask, who is this guy? Given the circumstances he could just as easily have wished them well. According to credible reports, the Trump administration responded by ordering all of its agencies to immediately halt any engagement with the South African chairmanship this year of the influential global economic club, the G20.
Ramaphosa has had no choice but to see Trump. The US is this country’s single most valuable trading partner. We run a huge deficit with China, even though it is nominally our “biggest” trading partner. We run a healthy surplus with the US, which buys much more from us than we buy from them.
That alone makes South Africa a Trump target as he seeks to reorder the global trading rules. But no-one expected the onslaught that was to come over land, Afrikaners, BEE and, now, a clear attempt to delegitimise Ramaphosa’s G20 chairmanship.
What awaits Ramaphosa on Wednesday is unclear. Trump is advised on South Africa by the ultra-rich and powerful Elon Musk, who was born here and who appears to have swallowed whole the claims by conservative Afrikaner groups that they are specifically being targeted by legislation designed to rob them of their rights and culture.
Will Musk, who is lately strangely missing from the action, be in the Oval Office when Ramaphosa sits down with Trump? Grok, the artificial intelligence capability embedded in his X platform, admitted the other day it had been programmed to promote the campaign to support the white genocide story being spread by the US administration.
Will Vice-President JD Vance be there? He led the breathtaking attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on live TV in the Oval Office in March. Will secretary of state Marco Rubio be in the room? More than any of the others, Rubio is a real threat to Ramaphosa in that situation. He is hardline, articulate, well-informed and deeply cynical. In front of a gaggle of the largely Trump-friendly White House press corps he could eviscerate Ramaphosa.
Whatever his other qualities, Ramaphosa is feeble under media pressure and goes out of his way to avoid confrontation. As a journalist I look forward to him having to take hostile questions. His stock answer is too often to deny even the obvious, and nothing would prepare him for an Oval Office special à la Zelensky. We will see. The meeting may be private.
Whatever, Ramaphosa may just have to suck it up. Trump’s proposed 25% tariffs on imported cars would cripple the car industry here. Judging by informed speculation doing the rounds, we do not have much to offer in return other than more US participation in our vague future plans. We have a lot of those, especially in energy and infrastructure, none of which the state can afford and the US, anyway, holds sway in most of the development banks and finance institutions we might want to approach for funding.
South Africans seem to be divided about the coming meeting. A significant number of accounts on X would like to see Ramaphosa humiliated, but that just has to be wrong. The bad guy in that room, by any measure, would have to be Trump, who Bruce Springsteen just described as “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous”. The man is self-destructive, a menace to his own country, let alone the rest of the world.
Ramaphosa doesn’t have a lot to offer him beyond, perhaps, a few baubles and many references to Nelson Mandela, Table Mountain, gold mines and perhaps lions. But the attempt has to be made. Trump listens to Musk and Gary Player, and perhaps Johann Rupert, but he really doesn’t care and he’s so spectacularly uninformed most of it would simply pass over him anyway. But as he reaches for a major media moment for the morning or afternoon of the Wednesday meeting, almost anything is possible. That’s the Ramaphosa risk.
For the party travelling with him — foreign minister Ronald Lamola, trade & industry minister Parks Tau, DA leader John Steenhuisen as agriculture minister and, probably, his new special envoy to the US, former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas — Wednesday will be simply unforgettable.
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