With Donald Trump in the White House it becomes doubly difficult to change his mind, such as it is, if he takes against you. And it’s not just foreigners who get it in the neck.
When US jobs statistics came in looking particularly grim the other week Trump simply fired the head of the office that produced them.
The intelligence officers who reported that US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June didn’t do as much damage as Trump had reported have also been fired.
So how does SA confront a hostile Trump now that he has imposed 30% tariffs on our major exports to the US? Trump is determined that the ANC government in SA is treating Afrikaners, and Afrikaner farmers in particular, “very badly”.
In the wake of the spectacular Oval Office ambush on President Cyril Ramaphosa in May the charge of a genocide on Afrikaners has been largely abandoned. It is being replaced by persistent accusations that whites in SA are being discriminated against.
Far more seriously, the notion that Pretoria has collaborated with Iran, an arch US enemy, is finding firm traction in Washington. This is probably tied to SA’s decision to take Israel to the International Court of Justice to face charges of genocide in Gaza, but Iran has become a real danger to government’s efforts to do a trade deal with the US and calm the waters between the two countries.
You can perhaps understand how Americans, far away and with no real interest in this country, could be swayed by the stories about SA and Iran. Heaven knows — government, incoherent as it is, sometimes seems to do its best to inflame the issue. A visit to Iran by the head of the defence force, still without the slightest consequence, is a case in point.
But I’m still astonished at the way it has become almost trite to argue that Iran somehow bailed out the ANC a few years ago when it was in deep financial trouble. There is no actual evidence to support this so-called truth. It is a rumour and nothing more, in the same class of chatter that Russian President Vladimir Putin must have some kind of hold on Trump.
Trump treats Putin with kid gloves, therefore there must be something substantial and probably disgraceful to explain it. We treat the Iranians with great deference, therefore they must have given the ANC party money. Perhaps there actually is something to it in both cases, but no-one spreading either rumour has bothered to try to substantiate them.
It’s interesting that roughly the same South Africans who think Iran rescued the ANC from bankruptcy also fully accept Prof William Gumede’s calculation that just 100 ANC cadres have collected R1-trillion (he says that’s a conservative count) from BEE since 1994.
There’s no reason to doubt Gumede’s numbers, but seeing as we already know BEE is partly there so recipients of BEE largesse can kick back some of what they are given to the ANC, why discount or ignore the possibility that the money the ANC needed to get out of its financial hole from around 2017 came from the usual sources? It couldn’t pay salaries at one stage, and then suddenly it could.
Between them, those 100 BEE types could have recapitalised the ANC without breaking the tiniest sweat. A trillion rand is a thousand billion. Two billion rand, 0.2% of R1-trillion, would have effortlessly got the ANC up and running again.
But to suit the conspiracy theorists the money had to have come from Iran, exchange controls notwithstanding, and the American government has got its teeth into the hearsay. The ANC-dominated SA government typically doesn’t have a clue what to do. The banks the ANC uses will know the truth, and you have to wonder what they’ll do when Trump tightens his sanctions against us.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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