Ramaphosa and Trump

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

The big news in South Africa today is, of course, the meeting between Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, and Donald Trump. International diplomacy on live TV is an initiative of the new Trump administration, and afterwards words like “ambushed” were bandied around and comparisons were made to the disastrous meeting between President Zelenskyy and the US president. But Ramaphosa seems to have held his ground as well as his temper.

A number of issues have led to the low in relations between the two countries. South Africa's close ties with Russia and China through the BRICS initiative is one, although Trump seems to have better relations with Vladimir Putin than Ramaphosa does anyway.

The outspoken, and, frankly, inappropriate comments of the South African ambassador to a South African group about the Trump administration led to friction and his expulsion from the US. Ambassadors have a job. Comments like that should be reserved for their memoirs written after they’ve retired.

South Africa’s challenge to Israel at the international court was another unpopular move with the US and no doubt sparked the counter accusation of South Africa’s alleged genocide against white Afrikaner farmers that seems to have caught Trump’s fancy. Ramaphosa took with him a white support group consisting of two of Trump’s golf heroes – Retief Goosen and Ernie Els, billionaire investor Johann Rupert, and the leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, John Steenhuisen. Steenhausen is now Minister of Agriculture in the Government of National Unity. Exactly the right person, one would think, to address Trump’s concerns.

In the end, what did Trump’s ambush come down to? A collection of song clips of Julius Malema singing racist songs. Ramaphosa pointed out that Malema is a firebrand opposition politician, not a “government official” as Trump described him.

Graveyard along the highway. Not.

Then there was the field of crosses – a grave yard of murdered white farmers extending for miles, we were told. Actually, it was a protest at the murders of Glen and Vida Rafferty on their farm. There were no actual graves. There was no intension of a correlation between the number of crosses and dead farmers of any racial group.

Finally, there was a gory murder scene. This was from the DRC, nowhere near South Africa at all.

This was the evidence of genocide in South Africa. Certainly the number of murders and other crimes is appalling. Steenhuisen emphasized that South Africa has a serious crime problem. And that most of the victims are black. But that there is no evidence of a campaign to murder white farmers or drive them from their land.

Ramaphosa asked only, in Nelson Mandela’s words, that when there is a problem we sit down together and work it through from the beginning. South Africa can only hope that once the curtain came down on the White House's theatre for television, that is what happened.