JUSTICE MALALA | So what exactly does Trump want? South Africa is about to find out

President Cyril Ramaphosa and his delegation to the US must not harbour any illusions about the treacherous path they have to walk and the difficult task they face.

If Ramaphosa and his ministers want to eke out some victories from their meeting with US President Donald Trump then they need to be very clear-eyed about what the meeting is, who Trump is, what the people around him represent and what the meeting can achieve. 

It will not be a rational meeting, because nothing is rational about the assault on South Africa. The meeting’s chances of ending in a detente of some sort are very slim. Very possibly, after the meeting, there may be more measures to further punish South Africa. 

This is not to be negative. All South Africans must wish Ramaphosa and his delegation luck. The delegation itself must travel with the hope, optimism, goodwill and self-belief that the president used to display when he was the ANC’s chief negotiator at the democracy talks in the 1990s. Yet this is also realpolitik, and that demands that there be a clear appreciation of what the delegation faces. 

It faces, first and foremost, a Trump administration (and its friends) who have become evangelical proponents of the lie of a white genocide in South Africa. Not only have members of the US administration swallowed this lie, but they are also happy to stand beside a man such as Elon Musk, who has weaponised this lie and is now blatantly and openly changing his Artificial Intelligence product Grok to tarnish and besmirch South Africa.

Last week’s exposé of how Grok had, in previous instances, debunked the claim of “white genocide” while quoting credible sources and statistics and then how it had, after being fiddled with by its creators, started obsessively and crazily spewing “white genocide” lies in unrelated conversations, showed just what the people around Trump are prepared to do to besmirch the country's name with lies and gain the upper hand over South Africa. 

Trump, who regularly plays golf with South Africans such as Gary Player and others who enjoy the golf courses of the country daily and are not subject to any genocide, repeated the “white genocide” lie as recently as last week. Immediately after that his administration withdrew from all participation in the G20 summit’s activities. This came after a relentless blast of actions that started on January 20 when Trump was sworn into office. It continues unabated. 

So what does Trump want? This is crucial for Ramaphosa to work out. Trump has ranted about “white genocide”, but how exactly does he want South Africa to respond when there is objectively no white genocide in the country? Does he want policy change on land? How is the ANC government going to do that when it has objectively not expropriated a single square metre of white-owned land without compensation since 1994? 

On this “genocide” and land expropriation point there is no rationality. The facts do not matter to the Americans. Even if the folks at AgriSA shout and rant that there is no genocide of white farmers, the Trump administration won’t accept it because they are not about the facts. They will merely shout at and humiliate Ramaphosa before the White House press corps the way they tried to humiliate Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. 

Is this animus towards South Africa about its International Court of Justice case against Israel? Has the US said explicitly that South Africa should withdraw it (can South Africa do this now and how would it explain to the court that suddenly it believes there is no alleged genocide in that region)? If this is the US demand, then at least there is room to talk, as this is a tangible demand. South Africa can say yes or no. 

If the South African delegation did not know it, then last week’s trip by Trump to the Gulf states should have shown it that the US president is about deals for himself, his family, his allies, then the US. He has been showered with gifts and his family has shamelessly signed deals while close associates have seen deals accrue to them. Second, as his tariff agreement with China demonstrated, he makes a whole load of belligerent noise and then settles and claims “the art of the deal” has triumphed once again. Even a bad deal is, for him, something to crow about. 

Without compromising South Africa’s moral core and the fact that the country’s defeat of apartheid and the installation of democracy in South Africa was a victory for all humanity, Ramaphosa and his delegation must find a way to strike a deal with Trump. A starting point would be to make Trump understand that he is not the US, that he won’t be around forever, and that his assault on South Africa will unravel with his legacy in years to come. Then perhaps he will be incentivised to strike a deal of some sort. 

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