The new parliamentary session opens in the shadow of a world gone mad, with a US president playing the politics of vengeance and SA facing the revenge of a bunch of émigré white racists led by Elon Musk.
One call to Musk from President Cyril Ramaphosa isn’t going to solve it. Neither will a series of social media ripostes, nor “if they bully us we will bully them”-type statements such as mineral resources minister Gwede Mantashe made at this week’s Mining Indaba.
The US isn’t directing this scapegoat stuff at us only, but SA’s long neglect of its relationships with the US, as well as its failure to articulate a coherent foreign policy aligned with its economic interests, has come back to bite it — as have the émigré tech oligarchs we can’t seem to disown.
The few weeks since Trump’s inauguration have been a devastating demonstration of how fast institutions can be destroyed, even in an advanced country with supposedly strong checks and balances. If the freeze on foreign assistance, including the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) HIV-fighting billions, wasn’t enough, the shuttering of USAID is even worse. And if SA’s healthcare services and NGOs more generally will be hard hit, many other African countries that are more dependent on aid will be hit even harder. Even if some of those funds are ultimately unblocked, the damage would have been done. The uncertainty alone makes it impossible to sustain organisations.
Then there are the trade tariffs, again endlessly unpredictable. One minute Trump imposes 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada (and 10% on China), the next he agrees to suspend them for a month. And what’s notable about the language of his tariffs is it is punitive — Canada supposedly exporting fentanyl; Mexico exporting migrants — lacking any clear economic rationale.
Likewise his threat on Truth Social to “cut off all future funding” to SA until a full investigation has been completed of the situation in which, according to Trump, “SA is confiscating land and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY”. The particular variety of funding is not specified, but the new Expropriation Act is clearly the trigger — just as it was when Trump took a swipe at SA seven years ago during his first term as president. SA-born would-be US ambassador Joel Pollak, who seems to be campaigning for the job in interviews and panel discussions even if he is not necessarily the candidate, is playing the race card big time with his critique of BEE policies.
And now US secretary of state Marco Rubio tells us by tweet that he won’t be coming to the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting at Nasrec later this month, accusing SA of “anti-Americanism” and of using the G20 to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). We have to hope treasury secretary Scott Bessent doesn’t snub the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors’ meeting in Cape Town this month as well.
While SA might be the scapegoat, the bigger worry is this isn’t just about SA but about the G20 itself. Woolly as its agenda often is, it is a crucial forum for the leaders of the world’s important economies, and the Finance Track is important in quite concrete ways for the world’s financial system. Rubio’s snub raises tentative concerns that the Trump administration could shun the G20 even though it is next year’s host. That’s a big problem for the world, not just for SA, though there were hopes that our G20 presidency would help to rebuild relations with the US.
The economic relations matter because the US is one of SA’s largest trading partners. And though only about a fifth of SA’s exports to the US are under the African Growth & Opportunity Act (Agoa), if the US boots SA out of Agoa the signal will be hugely damaging, as will the impact on particular export sectors.
SA’s stances on Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza have damaged relations with the US, despite our protestations of nonalignment, but they might not have done nearly as much damage had government had a strong and astute diplomatic presence in Washington, and invested more time in nurturing a high level relationship. Instead, much time was spent nurturing the Brics relationship, while the embassy in Washington was reportedly mostly without its ambassador during the tenure of Nomaindia Mfeketo. The government sent a delegation to argue for Agoa last year and has now installed an experienced ambassador in Ebrahim Rasool. But it needs to work far harder on a foreign policy that genuinely serves SA’s interests, not just in relation to the US but in general.
Mexico and Canada fell in line in response to Trump’s tariff threats. SA clearly isn’t going to cave in on transformation or DEI, nor should it. And with the G20 presidency finally giving it the chance to show it can be even-handed and advance genuine multilateralism, it can’t cave in on that either. It may risk losing trade and aid from the US, and it must try to navigate that as carefully as possible. The most reliable way to do so is at home. That means improving our ailing public healthcare services and allocating social service budgets more effectively. It also — again — means acting with urgency to turn around our ailing economy, and specifically to enable more and better exports of services and goods.
As the new government of national unity parliamentarians take their seats they will have to focus their attention on what they can do to position SA and set it up for prosperity despite a crazy, scary and unpredictable world.
• Joffe is editor-at-large.
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