Real pressure is almost always unexpected, and SA was woefully unprepared for the squeeze that is being put on it now by the US. Its responses have been confused and conflicting as a result.
The rand has slumped badly against the dollar, sterling and the euro. The all share index on the JSE has fallen precipitously, from almost 90,000 to almost 80,000 in just a few days. Bond yields, which track the cost of repaying our debt, have risen alarmingly.
Much of the turmoil is indirect; a generalised, global downturn triggered by the wild and unprovoked trade tariff war launched by US President Donald Trump on every country in the world except Russia last week.
But a lot of it is also home-brewed, with Trump and the US Congress targeting SA over its charges of genocide against Israel and wild accusations, accepted as fact by Washington, of the ANC’s “persecution” of Afrikaners, and farmers in particular.
SA’s pursuit of close ties with Iran, Russia, China and Hamas, which the US regards as its enemies, is done proudly in SA, and we have been courting trouble in foreign policy for decades. Israel is a hugely popular cause in the US, and American administrations have for decades looked away as the ANC has chased its own anti-Western foreign policy choices.
Now there may be an actual price to pay. In addition to embracing the persecuted Afrikaner cause, Trump seems to be open to other possible sanctions directly on Pretoria. One fear is that he may try to place restrictions on financial flows from US institutions into SA bonds.
He is already being offered legislation to sanction the country — Ronny Jackson, Trump’s personal physician in his first term, has introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to punish SA for its friendships with Russia and China while also seeking individual sanctions against ANC leaders who may have shaped our foreign policy against what the US sees as its interests.
The ANC has for so long been able to needle the US without consequence that we have never really bothered to plan for a day when that might all change.
A second bill in the House, from another Republican, is the Asylum for Farmers & Refugees in Crisis & Necessary Emigration Resettlement (Afrikaner) Act, which would give priority-2 refugee status to Afrikaners, an SA “ethnic minority group that have suffered persecution, or have a well-founded fear of persecution, on account of their race, ethnicity or ancestry”.
In both cases all it would take is support from House speaker Mike Johnson to get the bills rolling. Given Trump’s already hostile lead, Johnson’s support is a given, and SA is an easy target.
Part of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s problem, as he (correctly) tries to remain measured in the face of an existential threat, is that the ANC has for so long been able to needle the US without consequence that we have never really bothered to plan for a day when that might all change.
The ANC was completely surprised by Trump’s election victory last November, hurrying out Ebrahim Rasool as the first fully functioning ambassador in Washington in years. He lasted two months. Now our next most senior diplomat in the US, Thandile Babalwa Sunduza, the consul-general in Los Angeles, has had her accreditation revoked and will also have to return.
But it is in the body of government in the US that SA has grievously failed to to nurture relations, nowhere more spectacularly (badly) than with the US department of defence. No-one in the US believes the still unpublished findings of Ramaphosa’s judicial inquiry into what the Russian freighter Lady R was doing in the Simon’s Town naval base in December 2022.
What they do remember are many small cuts. Defence minister Thandi Modise moved the dias at the annual African Aerospace & Defence expo outside Tshwane in 2022 so she didn’t have to speak in front of American aircraft. SA military officials visited Moscow just days after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Probably most damaging was the affair, barely reported, of the USS Hershel “Woody” Williams, a general service vessel in the US Navy, which went aground off Libreville in Gabon in May last year. Though it was soon refloated, the captain was relieved of his command.
Concerned for their vessel, the Americans asked SA for permission to dock at Cape Town harbour to take on fuel and supplies and do a more careful check for damage.
To do so they quite reasonably requested that the ship be allowed to berth under the terms of the current Status of Forces Agreement (Sofa) between the two countries. Sofas are routine between nations, allowing sailors to disembark and that the visiting ship or aircraft not be boarded or inspected by the host.
Astonishingly SA, having grandly escorted the Russian Lady R into its main naval base, declined the US vessel permission to dock under the terms of the Sofa and the ship was forced to limp on around the Cape to the Seychelles.
Also last year, the US failed for the first time to send a display of aircraft to the African Aerospace & Defence expo after the SA department of defence failed to approve, under the Sofa, the details of the US visitors in time.
There’s little Ramaphosa can do now about all that, except to more fully come to terms with the scale of our neglect of the US relationship.
Perhaps others will talk sense into Trump about tariffs, but that would still leave Pretoria facing an angry Washington.
One response now would be to pull out the old apartheid playbook and send plausible envoys to the US to tell our story to local communities and media in the US and invite as many Republican legislators as we can to visit the country and see for themselves.
Our story is too often grim, but it is not universally bad. Ramaphosa needs to snap out of his freeze.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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