Trump’s ambush of Ramaphosa leaves SA reeling

EFF slams Ramaphosa after Trump tirade, but business leaders urge focus on trade progress.

South Africans watched aghast on Wednesday as US President Donald Trump berated their leader in the Oval Office over false claims that there’s a genocide against White people in the country.

Watch: Presidents Trump and Ramaphosa meet

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President Cyril Ramaphosa was upbeat ahead of his White House meeting, but the tone quickly shifted as Trump confronted him with a video and printouts of media reports purporting to back up his claims. Vincent Magwenya, Ramaphosa’s spokesman, called it a “well-orchestrated, well-planned” ambush, and it confirmed some advisers’ fears that he would face a Volodymyr Zelenskiy-style dressing down.

Read: Trump lectures Ramaphosa in latest Oval Office ambush

Back home, most observers praised Ramaphosa’s cool. The standoff received blanket media coverage in South Africa  – “Calm Cyril Survives Trump’s Ambush” ran the headline in today’s Sowetan newspaper, while The Citizen described the encounter as a “White House shoot-out.”

“I think President Ramaphosa showed tremendous restraint. He showed what he is globally renowned for — that he can have conversations with people who strongly disagree with him,” said Melanie Verwoerd, an independent political analyst and South Africa’s former ambassador to Ireland. “The meeting was expected to be difficult, but I think no one expected it to be that difficult.”

Fani Titi, group chief executive of South Africa- and UK-based lender Investec, said it was important to look beyond “the fog of the press conference.”

“I think that yesterday was an opportunity to start the reset as over time that relationship has become pretty frosty,” he said at a media briefing on Thursday. “I’m aware that some negotiations on reciprocal tariffs are being discussed and I hope that we will see a positive outcome — but a good step forward despite the theatrics of the press conference.”

Ramaphosa had hoped to reset South Africa’s relationship with the US following months of acrimony during which Washington has frozen most aid, offered White Afrikaner farmers refugee status and imposed 30% “reciprocal” tariffs on imports from Africa’s most industrialised economy. The president later told reporters some progress had been made toward forging closer trade ties during closed-door talks with Trump, with officials agreeing to hold further discussions.

“I think it was a tough Oval Office meeting, but I do think we have broken the ice,” said Adrian Gore, the vice president of lobby group Business Unity South Africa, who along with billionaire Johann Rupert and golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, were part of the South African delegation that attended the talks.

Hendrik du Toit, chief executive officer of South African asset manager Ninety One, said the meeting highlighted that South Africa’s 10-party coalition government, formed last year after elections failed to produce an outright winner, was working.

“We saw the leader of the opposition actually back up the president in front of President Trump and in the White House,” Du Toit said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “This experience for the South African leadership is important. You have to find a way to cooperate with the large economic blocks in the world, whether that be the US, China, or Europe. And you better get on message.”

The fact that Trump didn’t rule out attending a G-20 summit that Ramaphosa is due to host in Johannesburg in November was another positive, Du Toit added.

The Economic Freedom Fighters — the leftist opposition party that featured in the video aired by Trump purporting to back his claim of White persecution — said Ramaphosa had been humiliated and hadn’t done nearly enough to push back on the US leader’s falsehoods.

Ramaphosa “abandoned South Africa’s sovereignty and constitutional principles to appease White monopoly capital and Western imperialism,” the party said in a statement. “This is a betrayal of the people’s struggle for land, equality, and true freedom.”

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Three decades after the end of White rule — during which Black people were subjugated and excluded from commercial and political life — White families on average earn almost five times as much as their Black counterparts, data from the national statistics agency shows. A 2017 audit found that White people own more than 70% of rural land held by individuals, even though they make up around 7% of the population.

Killings of farmers have been falling over the last 20 years. That’s even as more than 27 000 people are murdered annually in South Africa, with a disproportionate number of the victims being young men in predominantly Black townships. No land has been seized by the state since apartheid ended.

While South Africa does have a significant crime problem, property rights remain intact and agriculture is flourishing, having doubled in size since apartheid ended in 1994, said Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa.

The notion that the farming sector in South Africa is under siege and people are running away “could be no further than reality,” he said.

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