The more complicated our world becomes, the more President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office battles to keep up.
Nothing better highlights the ineptitude of the presidency than its inability, in any convincing way, to answer the charge earlier this week by DA foreign affairs spokesperson Emma Powell that Ramaphosa’s special envoy to the US, Mcebisi Jonas, cannot get a US visa.
Jonas was appointed on April 14, to fix our battered relationship with the US after repeated attacks from a then new president Donald Trump and the early expulsion of our new ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool. But nothing has been heard about or from him in all that time. News that he has been unable to enter the US is not at all surprising.
The DA is well within its rights to raise questions about Jonas. But he is not the issue, and he has done nothing to deserve the attention. Yes, it was quickly discovered online after his appointment that he made some less than flattering remarks about Trump, but they were entirely accurate. Trump is a menace to his own country and to the rest of the world. And to us here.
The issue is the presidency’s inability to tell us the simple truth. Does Jonas have a visa to be in the US and do his job properly, or not? Instead it ducks and dives like a child caught with a hand in the cookie jar. I don’t think I have ever come across a national leader with a communications teams quite as poor as Ramaphosa’s.
Here’s an excerpt from a presidency statement put out on Tuesday: “The DA’s latest effort to embarrass President Cyril Ramaphosa’s special envoy to North America, Mr Jonas Mcebisi, involves claims — in the DA’s framing — that the US has rejected Mr Jonas’s ‘credentials’ and that Mr Jonas is therefore unable to perform his role as Special Envoy.
“In view of President Ramaphosa’s telephonic contact with President Trump as well as his working visit to Washington in May 2025, President Ramaphosa has not had a need for Mr Jonas to visit the United States on urgent business.”
First, the statement makes no mention of the DA claim that Jonas can’t get a US visa. Second, it describes Jonas as Ramaphosa’s special envoy to North America. Its hard to credit that this bullshit is actually in writing. On April 14 Ramaphosa said exactly this: “I hereby announce the appointment of Mr Mcebisi Jonas as my special envoy to the United States of America, serving as the official representative of the president and the government of the Republic of South Africa.”
So since when did the US become “North America”? Because Ramaphosa avoids media contact as much as possible and because he leaves these paltry things to his oily spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, we have no idea what is going on in the presidency — what the president thinks. We are kept as far away from the truth as possible.
It doesn’t matter whether Jonas needs to present credentials or not. What matters is the work he is supposed to be doing to shift US trade policy in our favour. That can only be done in Washington, and I’m afraid we must conclude that he cannot get into America and therefore cannot do the job Ramaphosa gave him.
We can also conclude that Ramaphosa doesn’t have the stomach to concede another defeat or admit to another poor decision. In most mature democracies such a self-evident failure would be quickly conceded. No-one would have made much of it had this been the case with Jonas earlier. Instead we have another communications disaster loading, with the president hiding behind his spokesperson.
In my only interaction with Magwenya a few months ago he flat out lied to me. My expectations in the Jonas case are low.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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