When all is said and done, the fuss about whether SA is removed from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), the US trade incentive programme, is relatively small beer. About 10% of SA exports go to the US but Agoa saves duties worth only R2bn or so a year.
Watching incoming US president Donald Trump make early appointments to his government-elect though, you wonder whether exclusion from Agoa wouldn’t be the least worst thing for SA over the next four years.
Former trade and industry minister Ebrahim Patel used to prepare us for exclusion by suggesting it would in fact be a graduation, an improvement, but his circumlocutions would not survive what’s coming to Washington.
The appointments pouring out of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, signal plainly that this is going to be an aggressive and vengeful government, intent on clearing out of its way anything it finds even vaguely disagreeable. In the space of two days this week huge new challenges suddenly appeared for President Cyril Ramaphosa’s coalition government.
Trump’s pick for ambassador to the UN, Elise Stefanik, is a Republican congresswoman who earlier this year cosigned a letter condemning SA’s pursuit of a genocide case against Israel in the UN’s International Court of Justice as “disgusting”.
His pick of Senator Marco Rubio, a hard-right child of Cuban refugees, as Secretary of State is borderline savage. Last month, Rubio tweeted sharp criticism of our government’s buckling to a Chinese request to force Taiwan to move its representative office out of Pretoria.
“The SA government is making a grave mistake by caving to Beijing’s demands,” he wrote. “SA should not fall victim to communist China’s diplomatic bullying tactics.”
Similarly, and I’m grateful to The Africa Report for watching this unfold, Trump’s pick as national security adviser, Michael Waltz, is no fan. He was one of the House foreign affairs committee members earlier this year to vote for a comprehensive review of US relations with SA because the governing party’s actions — its embrace of the Russians and its attack on Israel — was “inconsistent with its stated policy of non-alignment in international affairs”.
Peter Pham, a candidate for assistant secretary of state for Africa, told The Africa Report he wanted to “look at SA’s membership of the Brics+, its alliance with Russia, China, its ties to Iran... A country with all these things — does it meet the Agoa eligibility requirement? Add to that, its gleeful involvement in delegitimising Israel on the global stage.”
What’s alarming is that while we will hardly feature in Trump’s mind in the next few years, his appointees will be free to “deal” with us as they please. President Joe Biden’s White House has run defence for us as sentiment in Congress has slowly built against our foreign policies and the ANC grandstanding outside the country. That’s now over.
And Biden easy ride has seen our diplomacy in the US retreat. The ambassadorship of former Cape Town mayor Nomaindiya Mfeketo from 2020 was ineffective until she withdrew for ill health last year, replaced by a retired former colleague.
Pretoria is now sending former Western Cape premier Ebrahim Rasool back to the US as ambassador, where he served when Barack Obama was president.
Trump will be a tougher proposition altogether and the SA embassy in Washington is going to have to move far from its traditional US political hunting ground, the Congressional Black Caucus, to make any impact on Trump. It will find itself in trouble for its friendship with the Chinese and with Hamas, the group whose attack on Israel on October 7 last year triggered the war in Gaza.
In a podcast with me this week (Podcasts from the Edge on the Financial Mail online) former DA leader Tony Leon, also a former ambassador to Argentina, says Ramaphosa’s problem is that SA is poorly aligned.
Trump has his triggers and wherever they are, we are too. China, our hero, is his biggest economic target. Iran, our fraternal whatever, is his biggest diplomatic target. Cuba, our liberator, triggers almost all Republicans but none more than Trump’s incoming secretary of state.
And his administration will hold Israel so close it will be almost impossible, initially at least, for Rasool or any part of our government to get a hearing in Washington. And on top of all that, just to provoke Trump, we run a trade surplus with the US. Heaven forbid the Oval Office ever checks.
A good idea for Pretoria in times like this would be to lie low but its legal case against Israel requires it to stand up frequently and report to the ICJ and each appearance is guaranteed to fire up US hostility. SA chairs the G20 for a year from next month, the perfect platform for Trump to bully the world with the host, probably, the most likely only real victim.
The incoming administration is so pro-Israel it may even support further Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The incoming US ambassador to Jerusalem, Mike Huckabee, says “there is no such thing as a West Bank, there’s no such thing as an occupation” because Israel already owns the land there. Good luck to Rasool.
Perhaps, as time moves on more temperate voices may be heard and we can relax. I have some confidence in our young but quietly impressive minister of international relations, Ronald Lamola. He is thoughtful and careful.
And then of course there is Cyril Ramaphosa himself. Cyril is a great flatterer and Trump enjoys attention. Better still, Trump has a real SA hero and it isn’t Elon Musk. It’s Gary Player, the only non-American Trump follows on Twitter.
No way does the president-elect turn down nine holes with Player and, possibly, Ramaphosa, at Mar-a-Lago or at Johann Rupert’s gorgeous Leopard Creek Club in Mpumalanga, during the G20 summit here next November.
Trump’s a better golfer than Ramaphosa but Player, who will be 90 then, might have to be persuaded to let the visitor feel he’d done jolly well.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.