President Cyril Ramaphosa. File photo by GCIS
From Taiwan and intra-Brics trade to domestic land policy, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office has cast the Trump administration’s ire at South Africa as the result of, at best, a misunderstanding of policy matters, but more likely a deliberate misinformation campaign.
“The translation is that you just need to allow time for the Trump administration to settle in; once it settles in, then it will have sufficient time to process these issues properly,” Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, told a media briefing on Wednesday.
“But we are dealing with an unusual case of misinformation, and the spread of misinformation, and so we just have to be vigilant in being proactive with respect to communicating our position on these issues.”
Magwenya was asked about US President Donald Trump’s renewed threat to punish Brics nations or, as he put it, “these seemingly hostile countries”, with 100% tariffs should they seek to move away from the US dollar.
He said Ramaphosa had not raised Trump’s warning with fellow Brics leaders but it was worth noting that creating a single currency to rival the dollar has never been the intention of the bloc, which originally comprised Brazil, Russia, India, China and later South Africa, and now counts 10 members.
“We’ve had a flurry of announcements and executive orders in a very short space of time,” he said.
“What has been absent are engagements over these issues to build a proper understanding of what informs a stance such as the Brics grouping deciding that they will trade among themselves in their respective local currencies.
“Once there are engagements, particularly at bilateral levels, where each country that has some form of trade partnership and bilateral relationship with the US, we think these issues will over time be ironed out.
“They obviously do make for headlines that cause panic and cause a lot of concern, but we are placing our hope that ultimately there will be engagement over these issues.”
Trump’s warning has raised the spectre of a trade war in the G20, and his announcement on Sunday that he was suspending all aid to South Africa pending a review of the “bad situation” in the country has sparked fears that this was perhaps just a first punitive step by its second largest trading partner.
Economists have noted that the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) might be the obvious way for Washington to inflict further pain on the Ramaphosa administration after withdrawing donor aid in excess of $300 million a year.
Government officials have privately said they share this concern but have been at pains to say nothing publicly lest it provoke Trump and White House officials ahead of negotiations on extending Agoa beyond 2025.
“In President Trump’s announcement, there was no mention of Agoa, there was mention of trade, so I would not conflate the two,” Magwenya said.
“Agoa matters are very separate from this issue. I would also not start speculating as to what may or may not happen around Agoa. All we know, or all we know as a government, is that Agoa is a mutually beneficial trade relationship.”
He stressed that South Africa remained in the dark as to what precisely moved Trump to suspend all donor funding to the country, a fortnight after much of it came to halt anyway when he announced a 90-day freeze on all funding for the United States Agency for International Development.
The agency seems destined for closure as part of a wanton shredding of the federal civil service by Elon Musk, the South African-born tech billionaire turned Trump lieutenant who appeared to second his outburst on local land legislation.
It came just over a week after Ramaphosa assented to the Expropriation Act, which sets out the narrowly confined instances in which the state can expropriate land in the public interest without offering compensation.
Magwenya said the legislation appeared to be in dispute with Washington “purely out of their own misreading and misunderstanding of the act and its intention”.
He confirmed that Ramaphosa had called Musk to make it plain that South Africa the state was not in the process of confiscating private land, as Trump appeared to suggest.
The president did so because Musk commented on a statement his office posted on X on the subject with the retort: “Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?”
Magwenya said: “It was sensible and logical and quite important that the president engages with him, so that we reinforce his own understanding of what is happening in South Africa and we flagged our concern with regard to the disinformation that we saw in the announcement by President Trump, but also in his own response to our statement.”
He stressed that Musk’s influence was twofold in that he is not only close to Trump but owns X.
“It was important that they have that conversation and that that understanding is emphasised, at least to benefit Elon, but also considering his influence within the Trump circle for the president to deliver that message.”
Trump, in the post on Truth Social announcing his decision, said aid would be suspended “until a full investigation of this situation has been completed”.
The US embassy in Pretoria said on Wednesday it had “no updates” as to who would lead that process or what it would entail. It is understood that diplomats were not told in advance of Trump’s decision.
Magwenya dismissed speculation that the deeper motivation might be to punish South Africa for its policy on the Middle East, in particular its genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice.
Washington is yet to name a new ambassador to Pretoria, as the embassy reiterated on Wednesday, but there has been some suggestion that Breitbart news network’s editor-at-large, Joel Pollak, may be under consideration for the post.
Pollak this week granted an interview in which he ventured, against all diplomatic custom, that Trump will “play hardball” with Pretoria on its economic and foreign policy because these “were at odds with Western norms” and aggrieved investors.
“We can’t speculate around the reasons that led to the recent announcement by President Trump,” Magwenya said.
“All we know is that that announcement is informed by things that are not true about our country, about things that are not true about the manner in which we apply legislation. As to what discussions took place in the White House leading up to that announcement, we cannot speculate and draw parallels with other issues.”
He did, however, point to lobbying in the US by white minority pressure group AfriForum and accused it of sowing racial division, as well as disinformation in Washington.
“They have been loud enough to then find an ear within certain quarters in the US leadership establishment,” he said, adding that he would venture that it would be a waste of Ramaphosa’s time to talk to AfriForum.
This week also saw Republican senator Ted Cruz suggest that South Africa’s instruction to Taiwan to move its liaison office from Pretoria by the end of March, after an earlier deadline was extended, will escalate tension with Washington.
Cruz, who sits on the house’s Foreign Relations Committee, claimed on X that the South African government was seemingly intent on alienating the US and its allies.
“Their timeline to expel our Taiwanese allies from Pretoria is deeply troubling, undermines the national security interests of America and our allies, and will deepen tensions between the US and South Africa.”
Magwenya said this was puzzling because only about a dozen countries recognised Taiwan and the US was not among them. South Africa’s decision to cut diplomatic ties was taken years ago when Nelson Mandela was president.
“This is something again that we think we will be able to communicate to our US counterparts so that they understand it better.”
Even if agreement was not found, it should not spell the end of the relationship, Magwenya said. He added that Ramaphosa hoped to speak to Trump soon, and to host him for a state visit ahead of the G20 summit in Johannesburg in November.
Returning to Ramaphosa’s initial reassurance after Trump first fired off a warning at Brics in December, that he believed he could resolve any differences with his new US counterpart on the golf course, he said this was still the president’s attitude.
Political analyst Ebrahim Fakir said he believed this week had seen Trump try to make a nation of mid-level importance feel his power, without any particular policy strategy or plan for further retribution for policies that do not align with his.
“I don’t think Trump cares that much, and I think it is not possible to predict what he will do,” said Fakir. “I don’t think he even knows. So everybody needs to calm down and wait.”