President Cyril Ramaphosa is seeking to strike a deal with his US counterpart, Donald Trump, as part of Pretoria’s efforts to reset its relationship with Washington, which has so far shunned diplomatic efforts.
The SA government’s diplomatic efforts to repair its relationship with the US — which has been strained due to a flawed understanding of the Expropriation Act — have so far come to naught.
The Solidarity movement, which includes AfriForum, has met officials in the Trump administration and sought to drum up support for a separate Afrikaner development.
“We’ve got to make a deal of one sort or another, on trade issues, on diplomatic issues, on political issues, a whole span of issues,” Ramaphosa told investors at an event hosted by Goldman Sachs on Thursday.
Trump’s 10% tariffs on all Chinese imports and the looming 25% tariffs on the US’s main trading partners — Mexico, Canada and the EU — are expected to affect SA too, though the US has not directly imposed higher import taxes on SA. SA, however, does benefit from the African Growth Opportunity Act (Agoa), which provides SA businesses with duty-free access to US markets.
The US allocated $440m in aid to SA in 2023, the latest year for which US government figures are available, of which $364m went to health.
“It all seemed to go a little bit off the rails because he [Trump] was responding to an initiative we put in place about the original addressing of the original sin in SA, the issue of land, and he got the wrong end of the stick because some people whispered to him that we’re taking land from people, and there’s genocide and all that, which is all not true,” Ramaphosa said.
“SA and the US, apart from the G20, were joined at the hip. They are our second-biggest trading partner and we are participants in Agoa and we export very important products to them.”
The US’s antagonistic stance towards SA was in full view at two high-level G20 meetings. US top diplomat Marco Rubio’s absence from the foreign ministers meetings last week and the cancellation of the traditional photo-op with foreign ministers were among incidents that reflected the tension among the leaders.
US treasury secretary Scott Bessent is also not attending this week’s G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Cape Town.
Rubio cited SA’s alleged “anti-American” stance for his reasons, while Bessent said he had prior commitments in Washington.
“Our international policy has always been to play a neutral role and to be nonaligned. We’ve played that role throughout ... there are moments when people think we side with one against the other, but now it’s becoming more evident that our nonalignment is what is much more appreciable,” Ramaphosa said.
“Some say we punch above our weight, some say we’re too noisy, maybe we are noisy but we seek to craft peace, but we also seek to advance the interests of South Africans, particularly when it comes to trade.”
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