US president Donald Trump threw the cat among the pigeons last week with his social media post South Africa was doing "bad things" to minorities and taking their land away (untrue, for now) and he was suspending aid. This was primarily about the Expropriation Act.
SA's government and media, which frequently acts as a mouthpiece for the ANC, Daily Maverick's Stephen Grootes for example, wrote the Expropriation Act was fading from politics until Trump's statements. False. It's been in the public's subconscious since the ANC and Ramaphosa capitulated to the EFF's demand. If it was no longer headline news, why do the DA and others say they will test its constitutionality in court?
Referring to taking a tough stand against Trump. Grootes wrote Ramaphosa can, when necessary, be forceful. I suppose given an opportunity anyone can show a different side. But political aggression is not him. There's no disputing he's a supine, weak and ineffectual leader. For different reasons, he ties with Zuma as the country's worst post-apartheid president.
Under his presidency SA has not progressed socioeconomically - it's going backwards or struggling to maintain status quo. Corruption didn't appease - it got worse. He refuses to fire compromised people in his cabinet, and if that's not bad enough, has the stink of alleged corruption on him from the money in the sofa, which, let's be frank, was not from a cattle sale but likely foreigners allegedly purchasing influence.
He has something in common with Trump: neither are self-made men but in large part were gifted their stakes, and traded patronage.
From a party political perspective, Ramaphosa is a dire leader because he lost the ANC 2024's election and by a large margin. In any other functioning democracy - the liberal-left like to fool themselves SA is when it's fragile nation - he'd have been ejected. But the ANC's response to failure is promotion and, as someone recently wrote, a seat in Parliament.
Ramaphosa's and ANC's confidence following their election drubbing - hubris, exceptionalism and the embarrassingly twee communist ideology are still present, untouched by the reality of fading fortunes and citizen irritation - is due to the prestige of a coalition and semblance of stable government. "We achieved in weeks what others took months", he said at Davos. The ANC sold the DA a bill of goods but is lucky the DA wants to be in government - Steenhuisen's and Zille's pathetic desperation - more than the ANC wants or needs them to be, the hell with the consequences of a coalition with EFF and MKP.
So Ramaphosa's boasts and purported aggression, as Grootes would have it, is superficial. He and ANC are like a person in a borrowed tailored outfit accepting praise for someone else's style. Since he became president he's being a fading wallflower disappearing into the wallpaper behind him. He and his ANC comrades are so intent on extractive practices - what commentators call "transactional" when referring to Trump - that they let the country slowly unravel.
Trump and Ramaphosa (and most politicians, including Zille) have their rabid, unquestioning supporters that forgive and forget every nasty business their heros have been involved in, bad leadership included. Trump 1.0 became Trump 2.0, and Ramaphoria 1.0 became 2.0, elections intervening. Only Trump won by a decisive margin in 2024 wheaeas Ramaphosa lost by one.
Who has greater credibility to their respective electorates and countries? But Grootes and left including mainstream media persists with the fiction Ramaphosa and ANC has credibility despite all their failures and venality at home and their friendship with autocrats and dictators abroad.
Despite basking in the reflected glow of the coalition - "GNU" - the ANC still follows its own policies on foreign relations - Ramaphosa: "SA is Russia's friend", about which the DA complained, and Taiwan's mission in Pretoria - and internally - the Expropriation Act, NHI ("We'll go to war" over it), BELA, BEE, etc.
Trump and Ramaphosa are two sides of the same coin.Trump is decisive, but in the wrong way, and irrational. Ramaphosa is terminally indecisive and a procrastinator and what Judith February referred to as his "clunky, uninspiring rhetoric of the past", ie barely rational. When Trump speaks, it's an uncensored stream of consciousness. Listeners are on tenterhooks for what comes next. When Ramaphosa speaks, it's soporific, equivalent to watching paint dry. Perhaps when Grootes means listeners were stunned into silence by Ramaphosa, it's because they were asleep.
Grootes and others have called Trump's suspension of PEPFAR "inhumane" and "immoral". I agree with the first description but not the second. There has been justifiable outrage about foreign aid cuts and suspension. (Don't forget other US agencies too have been affected so it's not directed only at foreigners.)
But as I noted elsewhere, all organisations, public and private, have or should have their operations regularly assessed. Trump's, with Musk running DOGE, motives for it are personal and retributive. But just because the ANC goverment has never done it - despite SONA promises, Treasury's budget speeches admonishing thrift and auditor-general reports about failing departments - doesn't mean its fundamentally wrong. In fact, from an operations point of view, it's essential, good governance which is unknown in SA.
Instead we have, eg the ANC doling out another above-inflation pay increase to already well-paid public workers, politicians and cadres while cutting health and education budgets to pay for it, genuinely and lastingly impacting the well-being of the nation, the majority of whom are poor black.
I worked for an NGO in the finance department and know donors' requirements must be met before the funds are granted and continuously. The funding relationship is one-sided; it's not a negotiation, and not one the beneficiary can win. Funds can be cancelled at any time and projects left high and dry. It happens, albeit not on the scale of US AID and with notice. And if beneficiaries think they're entitled to the donation, they're wrong.
But this is how comment about PEPFAR's suspension (now reinstated) has been framed here (even EFF, sworn enemy of capitalists, have spoken about it): we're owed, we deserve, we're poor, we're victims of racism, apartheid, capitalism and on and on. Anyone (like AfriForum who lobbied Trump) who does not go with this narrative is accused of racism, inhumanity, immorality as Grootes, media and the left are terming Trump (and Republicans in general), who are not morally required to be concerned about the welfare of South Africans or any other peoples.
Trump is a sociopath and all those things but not for the reason they give: aid. In an article in The Guardian this week Robert Reich, former US labour secretary and professor of public policy at Berkeley, writes about what motivates Trump. About why Trump stopped foreign aid, "he wants to show he can".
According to Reich, everything Trump's doing now - tariffs, deporting immigrants, Greenland, etc - is an exercise of power because he can. Its not for the benefit of Americans either, but "the bigger his demonstrable power, the greater his ability to trade some of that power with people with huge amounts of wealth, in the United States and elsewhere". Even CEOs, billionaires and Democrats are kowtowing to him.
This is the most insightful piece I've read recently about what is driving Trump.
Doesn't Trump's motivation and who he really is resonate with our experience of the ANC - trading power for money and not for the benefit of South Africans - and those bowing before them (Ramaphoria 1.0, 2.0 and all that went before)? But Grootes and left want to hold the moral highground and present the farcical image Ramaphosa et al is Captain South Africa and the Avengers defending SA and the developing world.
No country is obliged to give economic, humanitarian or any kind of assistance to another. It's good for the soul, for politics and in the donor country's national interest. The US, for all it's soft imperialism and bravura Americana exceptionalism, is the go-to country for assistance, the one even substantial powers like the EU expect to take the lead.
But even the docile, accommodating Biden administration warned SA's access to US aid and subsidies must be consistent with the US' national interest. Local commentators like Grootes deem SA's genocide case against Israel at the ICJ a trigger that would cease aid. That didn't happen, neither after the US' irritation with the ANC government's friendship with China and pariahs Russia and Iran. I doubt Trump gave much if any thought to SA until land expropriation was brought to his attention, if then only fleetingly. It's hubris to think SA is more important than it really is.
Analysts warned that under another Trump administration things would probably change for the worse, for the US and world. But still the surprise. The worldwide US aid cuts was met with shock. Further, his threat to cancel funding to SA because of alleged land expropriation, however ill-informed he is, is met on the liberal-left with outrage and horror. How dare he?, they say. There will be no expropriation without compensation and land grabs, they say, despite the Act leaving that open. If it's as they say from the presidency down - no nil compensation and not without legal process - why is its constitutionality being questioned?
I wish there is one country that would and could stand up to Trump. So far world leaders are murmuring and threatening counter action - tariffs. But that hero is not going to be SA or Ramaphosa. Instead he spoke with middle man Musk about the Expropriation Act. Ramaphosa avoids conflict - in his cabinet, with errant regional countries and friends Russia, Iran and China. He cannot even lead this country to a better future and instead is relying on the prestige of a shaky coalition to burnish his tarnished reputation.
Ramaphosa's SONA address last week in which he said South Africa would not be bullied did not deliver the result he and his cheerleading media wanted. It resulted in Trump signing an executive order stopping aid to SA. He and the rest of the choir ought to have known that one doesn't poke the bear and get away unscathed.
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