BIG READ: What happened during lunch in the White House

When the extended, closed-door White House lunch discussion between the US and SA presidents, cabinet members and guests was over, the now affable President Donald Trump had an idea. 

“Let me sign your nametags,” he suggested. After affixing his famous signature flourish to each SA tag, he asked President Cyril Ramaphosa to sign his as a memento, and told the South Africans to “please take them with you”.

Zingiswa Losi, president of SA’s largest union federation, Cosatu, told this story to illustrate that the atmosphere at the private meeting was completely different from the public excoriation in the Oval Office earlier. “There was no issue of irritation.”  

“There was a lot of laughing at the table,” she said in an interview. “He said SA is an important player, that the US cannot afford not to have trade relations with. That’s when the reset in relations took place.” 

DA leader and agriculture minister John Steenhuisen also described a different Trump from the one in the Oval Office hours earlier, or the one we see in public: “The US president was cordial, warm and engaging,” the DA leader said. He showed a sense of humour. “He’s going to deal with us sensibly.”  

The reset became clear around the Group of 20 (G20) attendance issue. After several months in which he and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have refused to commit to meetings because of SA’s foreign policies and its treatment of Afrikaner farmers, in the White House meeting Trump explicitly said he would come to Johannesburg in November, and that his cabinet would engage with their SA counterparts.

All US officials would participate fully in the G20’s commissions, which will meet in SA leading up to the Johannesburg summit in November.  

“You guys are the largest economy on the continent ... and you have minerals we need,” Steenhuisen recalled Trump as saying.   

The day before the Oval Office meeting, the SA ministers met US trade representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer, a cabinet member, who spelt out what the administration really wanted: “We want access to SA’s economy. Not so that we can compete with SA firms, but so that we can compete with Chinese and European firms in SA.” 

At lunch, Trump began thinking about his visit to SA.  

“How many US presidents have been to SA?” Trump asked. “Four,” replied Ramaphosa, according to Losi. “You will be the fifth.”        

Then he asked about security arrangements. Ramaphosa assured him SA was used to handling the security of visiting heads of state, but that the US always brought its own as well, which Trump was free to do. 

What does Trump want from SA?  

The US president was concerned by SA’s high car tariffs on US cars, and told his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, to liaise with trade, industry & competition minister Parks Tau on a trade deal.  

The Americans were interested in SA’s offer to buy US liquid natural gas (LNG), and Lutnick, a billionaire and friend of the president, “was very exercised by strategic minerals and car tariffs”, Steenhuisen explained

In a media briefing minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni confirmed SA agreed to buy 75-100PJ (petajoules) per annum of American LNG for 10 years from the US, “which will unlock approximately $900m-$1.2bn in trade per annum and $9bn-$12bn for 10 years”.

This is intended to be complemented with US investment in gas infrastructure in SA. The two countries will work together to explore areas of co-operation in key technologies, including fracking technology to unlock the production of gas.  

Tau’s opening trade offer was seen as a starting point, but US officials want the offer to be improved. They want to compete with other car companies, but are hampered by SA’s policy of high tariffs on imported cars, with the one exception — if a car firm manufactured and exported cars from SA, it would get an equivalent quota for tariff-free imports to SA.  

SA proposed that US car companies, in particular Tesla, build a car factory in SA to earn tariff-free import rights. But nothing in the meetings suggested that Tesla was planning to do so.

On the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), Trump said the act was in the hands of the US Congress. However, Steenhuisen left with the clear impression that Agoa will not survive in its current form, if it survives at all.

Trump, who promised trade deals with 90 countries in 90 days when he launched his “liberation day” trade war on April 2, has reached a single agreement so far, with the UK, which has been desperate for a trade deal with the US since Brexit.   

“The trip achieved three things,” Steenhuisen said. “We’ve started substantive negotiations on a trade deal, we’ll engage on the next phase for Agoa, and SA representatives will find doors open among all the officials we need to access to address remaining issues.”

Steenhuisen also cleared up confusion over how the SA golfers came to be at the meeting. Ramaphosa was criticised for inviting people who were not in his political camp and who were voluble critics of the government, and reports said they were chosen by Trump.

But Steenhuisen said Trump raised the idea of having his golfing friends in the meeting on a call with Ramaphosa as a joke. Gary Player and Ernie Els both have homes on Jupiter Island in Florida, 42 minutes along the I-95 highway from Trump’s base, Mar-a-Lago. 

Ramaphosa liked the idea. The golfers seemed to calm the US president, yet also animate him about his favourite sport. 

“He has an encyclopedic knowledge of golf,” Steenhuisen found. “He remembered what club one of the golfers used on which green to win a tournament in 1987.”  

How to explain such a radical reversal? 

The change of tone and tenor in the space of a few hours on the same day seems hard to explain except as Trump’s governing style and nothing else.  

Unusually, the “evidence” the president produced in the Oval Office, was neither supplied by official US channels nor vetted. Sources in Washington this week stressed that the documents and video would never have seen the light of day had normal processes been in place at the state department and the intelligence agencies.  

Some came from Elon Musk, who habitually retweets unverified posts that turn out to be false. 

Trump has not put the machinery for Africa policy in place. He has still not appointed an assistant secretary of state for Africa. Anyone who remembers the US-led talks around Namibia and Angola will appreciate the important role of the incumbent then, Dr Chester Crocker.

Trump is running Africa policy from the White House. One leaked document said he was considering disbanding the Africa bureau in the state department altogether.   

The most important official on US Africa policy, who reports directly to Trump, is his senior adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos, who in Qatar in May helped broker a draft agreement on the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Trump introduced him in the Oval Office.  

An orthodox Christian, Boulos is the Lebanese-American father-in-law of Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany, and headed the president’s effort to win Arab-American votes in the crucial state of Michigan in the 2024 election.

Trump’s three significant factual errors in his “proof” highlighted in his confrontation with Ramaphosa helped turn the international media to Ramaphosa’s side.  

That Trump claimed EFF leader Julius Malema and his supporters were “officials” when Malema is Ramaphosa’s bitter political opponent, and that a picture he presented as taken in SA was taken in the DRC, were widely noted.

His elaborate description of rows of grave sites where cars were parked to show respect for murdered white farmers and that these murders had no consequences, was also quite wrong.   

The crosses symbolised the dead of all races on farms, and the cars were driving to a funeral of a much-loved white couple. The three murderers were tracked down, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

The Oval Office meeting, witnessed live on television by tens of millions around the world, was one of the worst diplomatic outbursts in memory. Many who don’t think much about SA learnt for the first time, or learnt more, about SA’s horrendous crime problem.  

Perhaps it will bat away some foreign tourists who were contemplating a holiday here. Perhaps it will put off some would-be investors, if the nature of their business cannot make provision for their own security. 

But most important of all is that the relationship seems restored, and SA has a chance to promote investment and save jobs. Winning back Agoa remains a long shot, but it has been a long shot for some time already.  

But there are many ordinary citizens as well as some in the political, diplomatic and even business world who are well-travelled and used to doing business in rough neighbourhoods. For them, there were significant positive signals. 

From their point of view, it’s not difficult to see why.  

First, the SA president performed at his best. We may be used to him, and rightly mad at him for the poor performance of his government at home. But it is quite possible to imagine him as comfortable with Trump at a White House lunch, comparing notes with Johann Rupert, Els and Retief Goosen.    

The eastern DRC peace process was one area where Trump and Ramaphosa were on the same page. Ramaphosa’s preference for talks instead of war is in accord with Trump’s. For all his abusive language, he has been fairly consistent in opposing wars and preferring negotiated outcomes, even if he is careless about the terms.

“This is a clear example of what responsible regional leadership looks like,” Trump said, acknowledging Ramaphosa’s support for Boulos’ DRC peace effort. Ramaphosa thanked Trump for his “firm but fair” role in the talks and for “backing African-led solutions”. 

The US has funded the rebuilding of the rail link that would facilitate transporting minerals from the mines of the DRC. Trump is keenly interested in DRC minerals. 

Will SA botch this opportunity? 

Between the ice-breaking good humour and nametag signing at the end, Trump spelt out a very different vision of relations from now on. Will SA use it more wisely than before? 

One hopes the government has learnt something about our relative position in the world, and how bad our government’s failures are at home. Farmers are dying horribly, like other citizens, even though the murderers aren’t sanctioned by the government. The government has failed in its duty to protect us.

In the past, before Trump, US diplomats have often told me in confidence that SA ministers often took the US’s huge support of certain programmes for granted, and failed to respond to ambassadors’ requests for meetings even about large-scale US programmes for South Africans.

The government needed a jolt.   

Our pandering to former liberation allies is naive. The world has changed. Russian President Vladimir Putin is no idealist. Non-alignment can’t tilt one way. The Gulf oil states are after their place in a new commercial world order, not righting injustices. 

I was heartened to see afterwards that Ronald Lamola, our young international relations & co-operation minister, has learnt from the experience. At a recent Washington appearance he started by expressing condolences for two Israeli diplomats murdered in Washington. Perhaps he might have said the same thing before, but he left the impression that he has got the message.  

After the attention drawn by the US president to farm murders, Steenhuisen’s hand has been strengthened to demand results, and that rural crime be declared a high priority.

There’ll be no change in Johannesburg until there is a new government in the city council.

—  John Steenhuisen

DA leader and agriculture minister

But if this government doesn’t kick-start obvious reforms, including personnel changes, none of this matters for the ever-rising jobless masses.

Now that Trump has given the green light for the US at the G20 summit, the government is under extra pressure to make Johannesburg more presentable to international media than it is now.  

Steenhuisen is not hopeful. “There’ll be no change in Johannesburg until there is a new government in the city council,” he said.

In the White House meetings, increasing US investment in SA mining was also discussed, but reforms will be needed to jump-start stalled exploration.  

Musk chose to stay quiet in the Oval Office. His reputation and businesses have been badly hurt by the callousness of his mass firings in the US public service. There are campaigns around the world to boycott Tesla cars.

Behind closed doors, he again spoke very little, but showed interest in SA’s critical minerals to make magnets, in a reduction in tariffs to get Teslas into the SA market, and in a possible launch site for his SpaceX company.

Starlink did not come up, because the regulatory process has begun and it will take a year or two to know if a licence will even be offered.  

Both Musk and Lutnick were interested in SA’s critical minerals because of the shortage of rare earths, which are vital for magnets.

The Cosatu president reported a US official had even said that if a good trade relationship were developed, “we can consider processing so we don’t just send the raw materials”. 

Are sanctions against individuals in the ANC leadership out of the picture? Quite possibly not. Administration members have touted the use of the Magnitsky Act to sanction individuals named in the Zondo state capture report. 

Only we can fix what’s broken here. 

We dodged another bullet. But Trump can always take us on again. If there is one lesson from this saga, it is that we must raise our game.  

We can’t afford this drama. We need a new ambassador in Washington pronto. We need better leaders, quicker decisions, more professional ministers and more worldly advisers.  

Why can’t the ANC see that? 

Ramaphosa has only four years left, less if the next ANC president wants him out in 2027. Could any of the ANC’s would-be crown princes have pulled this off? 

• Matisonn is an author and political journalist and a former senior UN official.