Former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas.
The ministry of international relations on Wednesday dismissed the notion that former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas’s past criticism of US President Donald Trump disqualified him for his new role of South Africa’s special envoy to Washington.
“Engaging with those who underestimate President Trump’s tolerance for criticism serves little purpose,” Chrispin Phiri, the spokesperson for international relations minister Ronald Lamola, told the Mail & Guardian.
“His demonstrated ability to bridge divides with former critics speaks for itself and our focus should remain on nurturing sustained, constructive dialogue in the interests of both our nations.”
Jonas’s appointment was announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday, days after Trump imposed 30% reciprocal tariffs on South African imports, then suspended the decision for 90 days. However, the country still has to contend with a new, flat 10% tariff on most imports to the US.
Jonas’s brief is to negotiate a bilateral trade pact between the two countries amid a historic diplomatic freeze that began in February when Trump cut all donor aid to South Africa. But, mere hours after he was named, a video from 2020 surfaced in which he referred to Trump as “racist” and “narcissistic”.
“How we got to a situation where a narcissistic rightwinger took charge of the world’s greatest economic and military powerhouse is something that we need to ponder over,” Jonas said in the lecture to the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation that year, shortly after Joe Biden’s electoral victory over Trump.
Jonas, who blew the whistle on the Guptas’ attempts to capture the treasury, and now chairs MTN, has said he believed those in positions of influence would be sufficiently “mature” not to dwell on his remarks.
“People are mature enough to understand that the context has changed,” he said in a radio interview with 702 on Tuesday.
“At the time, I was outside of government — I was speaking as an activist. We have passed that point, I think, where this would be a problem.”
He will not be based in Washington and needs no formal approval from the US administration. In the interview, he described his role, in part, as soothing tensions and paving the way for the appointment of an ambassador. He stressed that the task was challenging but that he considered rebuilding relations with the US as vital to South Africa’s national interest.
The presidency declined to comment on the controversy over his past remarks.
Two sources with insight into the Trump administration’s thinking expressed surprise that Ramaphosa’s office did not make sure it scrutinised the past public statements of anyone he considered sending to Washington, given his US counterpart’s aversion to any perceived slight.
“One would have thought, knowing what we all do and tensions being what they are, that they would take care to ensure whoever they deploy had not said something that would hinder in getting a foot in the door,” one said, on condition of anonymity, while also pointing to the fact that Iran is a key market for MTN.
Ramaphosa’s office last month refuted suggestions by the US state department that South Africa was “reinvigorating its relationship with Iran to develop commercial, military and nuclear arrangements”.
Another US analyst more bluntly predicted that Jonas’s tenure would turn into “Rasool 2.0”.
This was a reference to the expulsion of South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, in March, three months into his posting, after he told a local think-tank that, under Trump, the US was seeing the rise of white supremacy, driven by a domestic demographic shift.
“The supremacist assault on incumbency, we see it in the domestic politics of the USA, the Maga movement — the Make America Great Again movement — as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48% white.”
Announcing his expulsion on X, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Rasool was a “race-baiting politician” who hated the US and Trump.
Ramaphosa’s office has signalled that he would take his time to weigh his nomination of a successor to Rasool.
Lamola has prepared a list of three potential nominees for Ramaphosa’s consideration. Many others have given the president unsolicited advice in this regard, including that it would be prudent to name an Afrikaner, given Trump’s insistence that the minority suffers racial persecution at the hands of a government seeking to address the legacy of apartheid.
The Afrikaners on the list on the president’s desk are at opposite political poles to those who have lobbied the White House and Congress for years to sanction the ANC for its policy choices. It includes deputy justice minister Andries Nel, the son of an apartheid-era ambassador to the US.
Nel’s name was leaked days after Rasool’s expulsion. It was done to rally support for someone who is a firm favourite in diplomatic circles, not least for his even temperament and ability to think strategically.
It also includes two diplomats who share the same name: Marthinus van Schalkwyk, who is South Africa’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, and the country’s high commissioner to Australia, the Marthinus van Schalkwyk who was the post-apartheid National Party leader and became a member of the ANC and of Thabo Mbeki’s cabinet.
The former has voiced strong criticism of Israel at the UN, and in government circles this has been considered an impediment. It is understood that, in choosing a new ambassador, the president is being mindful of the risk any nominee’s past pronouncements might pose.
The Democratic Alliance (DA), which since its inclusion in the ruling coalition, has been asking for a role in shaping foreign policy, this week said what transpired with Jonas underscored the need for extreme caution as to whoever is deployed to Washington in the current climate.
“Diplomatic envoys are the prerogative of the president, however, given the fact that the relationship with the USA is in a perilous position we need to be extremely pragmatic and careful about who we send to represent us in Washington DC,” the party’s deputy spokesman on international relations, Ryan Smith, told the M&G.
“It is unfortunate that Mr Jonas has made comments that could be perceived as offensive by, or problematic for, the Trump administration and we certainly hope that this will not be an impediment to getting the ear of the US government as there is important work that needs to be done to repair the relationship between our two countries,” he added.
“We also hope that a suitable ambassador will soon be appointed to deal with moving the relationship onto steadier and more constructive ground. This is especially important, given the spectre of grave trade-related consequences for South Africa, should the relationship deteriorate further.”
But amid the controversy, diplomats and government officials have asked who Ramaphosa could find for the role who enjoyed the full support of his government and the ANC and has not spoken out against Trump in the past.
They have pointed out that this applies to members of the US president’s own administration, including Rubio, who in 2016 infamously made innuendos about Trump’s anatomy, and should be seen in the context of politicians in and outside the US grappling to find a pragmatic approach to a president whose politics they abhor.
UK foreign secretary David Lammy has sought to downplay the relevance of past criticism of Trump, after he was reminded of saying the following in 2018: “Trump is not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath. He is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of Western progress for so long.”
One would be hard-pressed, Lamy noted last year, to find any politician who “didn’t have things to say about Donald Trump back in the day”.
Conservative US lawmakers are lobbying for targeted sanctions against ANC politicians and more than one Washington insider has recently suggested that Trump wished to see foreign policy in the hands of the DA.
But, as with the ANC, the party’s prominent politicians — including its founder Tony Leon and present leader of its federal executive Helen Zille — have hardly minced their words on Trump in the past.
Leon, who some in the DA favour for the role of ambassador to Washington, is on record as calling Trump “a narcissistic bully, a bad man” and someone “incapable of the minimum requirements of steady judgment, self-control and basic temperament needed for any high office”.