President Donald Trump’s Friday night executive order suspending its aid to SA was a “shock and awe” tactic, but more “performative” than substantive, SA’s ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, has said.
He believed the appropriate SA response was to be “resilient and patient rather than panic-stricken”, and to remain engaged at all levels, public and private. There were bound to be “unintended consequences” to Trump’s tidal wave of actions.
SA should focus on creating “comfortable conditions for a walk back”.
“We were certainly shocked,” Rasool said, but SA was already dealing with the aid cut off — the US administration had suspended aid disbursement globally two weeks earlier and the waiver for the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) HIV/Aids medications was largely moot in that SA was already shouldering most of the drug costs itself.”
The hit was being felt by 200 NGOs facing closure, with 1,000 healthcare workers being made redundant and several hundred thousand HIV patients losing access to treatment.
SA would also have to find R8bn to replace funding lost for the country’s HIV vaccine programme and clinical trials, Rasool said. “This will either have to be borrowed or taken from other services.
“President Trump may be replacing ‘America First’ with ‘America Alone’,” the envoy said, noting SA was hardly being singled out for rough treatment on flimsy pretexts. Friends like Canada, Mexico, Denmark, Panama and the EU were also in the crosshairs.
“He doesn’t have a particular grudge for SA. We should not think of ourselves as an exception and miss the opportunity for making common cause with others.”
Rasool thought it was significant that Trump has not threatened SA’s US market access under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), brandishing the tariff cudgel he has used with others, even though congressional Republicans called for SA’s eligibility to be reviewed.
The executive order refers to “our African partners” and Rasool speculated that the White House wanted to avoid “collateral damage”.
Meanwhile, the presidency will this week finalise the names of international envoys to be dispatched by President Cyril Ramaphosa to various countries as battle lines deepen between SA and the new Trump administration.
The envoys will be responsible for clarifying SA’s foreign and domestic policies after a series of false assertions by Trump and SA-born billionaire Elon Musk of widespread land grabs under SA’s new Expropriation Act. These have led to fears that SA’s relations with one of its largest trade partners could deteriorate.
“The process to formulate the delegation and finalise their mandates is under way. Once completed, an announcement will be made,” said Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, adding that an announcement was imminent.
Business Leadership SA CEO Busisiwe Mavuso said finance minister Enoch Godongwana’s budget next week will now have to contend with the unexpected withdrawal of foreign assistance from the US government.
“It appears that a combination of efforts to cut back foreign development spending by the new US government, and a mistaken view that the Expropriation Act amounts to a land grab, led the White House to order the halting of all aid and assistance to SA over the weekend.
“While the Expropriation Act is not perfect, it does not remove constitutional rights to property and due process in any expropriation,” Mavuso said.
“The loss of US funding is material, particularly for the Pepfar programme that is integral to our management of the HIV/Aids pandemic. Pepfar last year contributed $453m (about R8.5bn) in direct funding to SA, a substantial portion of the R30bn spent on the fight against HIV.
“Pepfar has been critical to the development of SA’s HIV response, not just in funding, but also in know-how and scientific research, and was until now a proud example of America’s support for development and improved health elsewhere in the world.”
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