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Many South Africans raised their fists and cheered when President Cyril Ramaphosa stood on the podium last Thursday and declared that South Africa would not be bullied by Donald Trump or anyone else in sovereign pursuit of its domestic and international policies. Trump is, in fact, a bully and we love it when the little guy pushes back.
“We will not be deterred,” Ramaphosa said to rousing applause across the political spectrum in parliament. “We are a resilient people. We will not be bullied. We will stand together as a united nation.”
But he conceded that the funding freeze by the US, initially temporary but now permanent, had put the treatment of thousands of people in HIV programmes at risk, as well as the target of extending treatment to 1.1 million more.
And that is the nub of the matter.
Much as we all like a David-versus-Goliath story, the ending is only satisfactory if the small guy goes on to vanquish the giant. And for all of Ramaphosa’s defiance in last week’s State of the Nation Address, South Africa will emerge very much the battered loser in this brutal warfare.
And we only have ourselves, or rather our government, to blame. Because for all of the many positives that have peppered South Africa’s 30-year post-democracy journey, with Ramaphosa’s ANC in government, there have been even more missteps, many of them bordering on the criminal.
There’s no escaping that South Africa is in the first place dependent on Washington’s largesse through the President’s Emergency Fund for Aids Relief, because of how spectacularly bad the government’s initial response to the HIV/Aids pandemic in the 1990s was, leading to millions of deaths that could have been avoided.
And now, according to Umamah Bakharia’s reporting this week, thousands of people living with HIV and related ailments like TB have been handed a practical death sentence because Trump is annoyed about the Expropriation Act and South Africa’s support for Palestine.
Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi told reporters this month that some 15 000 people employed in the health sector, including government workers and those whose organisations relied on US funding through Pepfar stand to lose their jobs in the fallout.
They will join some eight million unemployed South Africans, who have struggled to find jobs in an economy that has only mustered anaemic growth of around 1% percent for nearly two decades. And that is largely thanks to Ramaphosa’s ANC, which oversaw the wholesale looting and mismanagement of key state enterprises like Eskom, Transnet and South African Airways.
Sadly, beyond the first five minutes or so of his indirect jabs against Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, the rest of Ramaphosa’s speech last week did little to reassure us that he has anything up his sleeve to drag us out of the quicksand.