Team SA should have been better prepared for Trump ambush

Perhaps President Cyril Ramaphosa should have listened to those of his advisers who thought he should delay his Oval Office meeting with Donald Trump by at least another four weeks.

The delay would not have stopped the US president from attempting to use his South African counterpart as a prop in a televised spectacle aimed at impressing his “Make America Great Again” fanatics while, at the same time, sending a warning to other world leaders.

However, it would have helped Ramaphosa and his team to prepare better for what they knew lay ahead: an ambush.

When the president announced the appointment of businessman Mcebisi Jonas as his special envoy to the US, the consensus in government circles seemed to be that they were not going to be in a rush, that they would take their time to fully understand what lay behind Trump’s ratcheting up of hostility towards South Africa.

Though towards the end of his first stint as US president he had trumpeted false claims of a white Afrikaner “genocide” in South Africa, he showed little appetite to do anything about those claims.

At best, [Team SA] left the watching international audience with a terrible impression of a South Africa that is so overwhelmed by violent crime that its government is now out of its wits and begging Uncle Sam for salvation

But since his return to power this year he has upped the ante — not only insisting on publicly repeating the discredited accusation but threatening to boycott this year's G20 summit and ordering the US to take in “Afrikaner refugees” who claim racial persecution.

Who is feeding him all this stuff, for what purpose and what is Trump’s end game? The continent of Africa hardly features on Trump’s agenda, so why this obsession with the country at the southern tip of the continent?

Of course the South African ultra-right, which is active on social media platforms, and right-wing lobby groups that have been frequenting the US in recent years are responsible for much of the misinformation. But who exactly has told Trump what to make him abandon his seemingly preferred approach of not concerning himself too much with the internal affairs of other countries?

Trump is the type of man who clearly attaches a lot of value to what his friends tell him, making him susceptible to all kinds of gossip. You don’t handle such a politician as if you are dealing with a regular head of state who relies on his state department and intelligence services to provide him with verified reports of what’s happening in the world around him.

Team SA could have invested more time and resources in understanding who the “South African friends” he referred to at the meeting are, and what they were feeding him.

Some, like billionaire Elon Musk, are obvious and a quick glance at their social media accounts would have revealed that their “evidence” for the genocide included white crosses along a rural highway in northern KZN and “Kill the Boer” chants by the EFF’s Julius Malema.

Armed with those answers, Team SA would have gone into the Oval Office battle-ready and knowing exactly what ammunition was going to be used against them.

Though most of the outside world watching the reality TV show of a press conference would have been left unconvinced by Trump’s video “evidence” of a “white genocide”, Team SA's denials were not as emphatic as they should have been.

At best, they left the watching international audience with a terrible impression of a South Africa that is so overwhelmed by violent crime that its government is now out of its wits and begging Uncle Sam for salvation.

Violent crime is indeed out of hand, but solutions lie neither with the US government nor Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite technology being installed at police stations.

As the 2010 Soccer World Cup experience taught us, political will coupled with the provision of adequate resources to the police as well as rooting out corruption within the ranks goes a long way in reducing crime.

The rush to take the Oval Office meeting at the first available opportunity may have been motivated by Ramaphosa’s desire to make the G20 leaders' summit in November an absolute success. What better way to ensure that the global indaba, the first of its kind to be held on African soil, is a success than to secure the attendance of its most (in)famous figure?

Trump and his verkrampte secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had threatened non-attendance and Ramaphosa had set convincing the US president to change his mind as one of his targets for the meeting.

With Ramaphosa’s last term in office entering its final stages, the summit is likely to be the last international platform where he takes centre stage as host. His office would not like this crowning moment to be upstaged by Trump’s non-attendance in the way the Brics summit in South Africa last year was nearly overshadowed by the possible arrival of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The government delegation returned from the US meeting convinced that Ramaphosa had done enough, especially at the lunch meeting after the press conference, for Air Force One to make its way to Johannesburg in November.

If the main objective of the visit, however, was to “reset” South Africa’s relations with the US, then an important first step has been taken.

Perhaps one thing worse than being unfairly badmouthed by the president of the most powerful and influential country in the world is to be ignored by that country. South Africa has certainly not been ignored by the US.

At the start of the year, as Trump, Musk and Rubio turned up the volume on their criticism of South Africa’s policies aimed at reversing the colonial and apartheid legacy of a racialised economy, there was much commentary claiming that diplomatic channels would be closed and that no one in the new administration in Washington would have time for Ramaphosa and his emissaries.

Businessmen-turned-podcast-superstars were telling us, almost with glee, that Ramaphosa was soon to learn that South Africa was too small a player on the international stage and that her failure to kowtow to the US and the West’s geopolitical interests would lead to the country being cast aside as a pariah state.

Despite Trump’s theatrics, the meeting proved that South Africa remains an important global player even in the eyes of the current US administration. Since returning to the White House, Trump has barely met more than a dozen foreign heads of state in Washington, and one of those is South African. The meeting won’t suddenly make the two countries the best of friends; they differ on a number of key geopolitical issues. South Africa, as a post-apartheid society, seems to symbolise a political message that does not sit well with the Maga faithful, so not even invoking the name of the almost universally-loved Nelson Mandela would make them love the country. South Africans just have to live with that reality.

What is most important, though, is to keep the channels of communication with South Africa’s second-largest trading partner and superpower open.

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