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“We will not,” President Cyril Ramaphosa assured the nation, “be bullied.”
He was responding to a dizzying bombardment of punitive measures issued by US President Donald Trump in the form of executive orders.
Over the course of barely a fortnight, the US temporarily froze presidential funding for Aids relief worth more than R8 billion annually, research grants worth about R800 million annually, stopped other government financial aid worth R1.2 billion annually and put a question mark over our continued participation in the African Growth and Opportunity Act preferential trade agreement, putting at risk 250 000 jobs in the motor industry alone.
Trump also cheekily offered refugee status to Afrikaner farmers to protect them from the expropriation without compensation.
This was followed in short order by Secretary of State Marc Rubio announcing that he would not attend next month’s G20 summit in Johannesburg, the first under Ramaphosa’s leadership.
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One would have hoped that the blizzard of bad news would trigger just a modicum of introspection in the South African body politic.
Alas, it seems not. There ensued a generally narrative depicting a plucky Ramaphosa dishing it out to that US lout kicking sand in our faces. Ramaphoria is definitely back in favour.
The refugee status offer would, according to the US’ diplomatic mission in Pretoria, include all “disfavoured minorities”, and refers to all “settler groups” as qualifying. Nor are the orders limited to those under threat of the Expropriation Act.
It applies to “all government-sponsored race-based discrimination” and the “countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business”.
Depending which interpretation ultimately prevails obviously has enormous implications. South Africa simply cannot afford to lose the skills of its minority groups.
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But the key point is not contained in the Trumpian theatrics of refugee status. It was a throwaway sentence a third of the way down Trump’ order.
“In addition,” it reads, “South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military and nuclear arrangements.”
And it’s this, foreign affairs, not race discrimination, that is the US’ biggest beef with us. The US is no longer willing to passively countenance South Africa’s embrace of its enemies while it suckles contentedly at the bounteous teat of American generosity. It is no longer possible, the flurry of orders makes clear, to play both sides.
It’s time to stop the juvenile insults and the whining about bullies. This is realpolitik and the ANC-led government of national unity (GNU) ought to think carefully about whether it is willing to pay the cost that its anti-US, pro-Iran stance will exact.
Which brings us to the appointment of Ebrahim Rasool as Pretoria’s ambassador to Washington.
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This was a major misstep, an unforced error resulting from ANC hubris and the rabidly pro-Islamist ethos that thrives at the department of international relations and cooperation.
South Africa blithely assumed that Trump was unelectable and that all good things would flow from this. To goad the US by sending Rasool is monumentally stupid.
If Ramaphosa were really interested in finding common ground with the US, it would send a professional diplomat.
So, for starters, the GNU government should just stop digging. Replace Rasool. Send to Washington someone who has credibility, gravitas and demonstrably understands the political complications involved.
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