US President Donald Trump. (File photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The government this week redoubled its diplomatic efforts to forge common purpose with G20 nations as US President Donald Trump signalled he would continue to stigmatise and sideline South Africa.
Trump repeated his claims that the government is fuelling race hatred at home and human rights violations abroad, and the embassy in Pretoria had to issue a statement firming up his surreal offer of political shelter for Afrikaners.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has continued to mull over sending ministerial envoys to Washington to counter Trump’s narrative and mitigate the crisis, after briefing leaders of coalition partners in the government in this regard hours before his State of the Nation Address.
But there has been a realisation that embarking on such a mission too early would be a pointless, potentially embarrassing endeavour.
Facts, an insider noted, are incidental to Trump’s actions and interlocutors in Washington in short supply even before he directed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to reform the foreign service to enforce his “America First” foreign policy. Offices at the Bureau for African Affairs were emptied weeks earlier.
With no hope of a rapid detente, International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola has been discreetly reaching out to his counterparts, deliberately extending beyond South Africa’s friends in the Global South and its strategic partners in Brics.
The minister spoke to Canada’s foreign minister, Melanie Joly, and was hoping to talk to France’s Jean-Noel Barrot and Germany’s Annaleana Baerbock before the end of the week.
Officially, Lamola is networking in the context of South Africa’s year-long presidency of the G20, and seeking support for an agenda that calls for a “paradigm shift” to address underdevelopment, inequality and the climate crisis, themes that are anathema to Trump.
Rubio found in this further proof of “anti-Americanism” and cause to announce on social media that he will skip the summit of G20 foreign ministers that Lamola is hosting in Johannesburg next Thursday.
It will be followed five days later by a meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in Cape Town, where the attendance of the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent increasingly appears in doubt.
But Lamola is also trying to form alliances that protect South Africa’s aspirations to become a trusty middle partner in a fairer multi-lateral order, at a moment when fissures deepen and no one can expect to escape fallout.
Canada is the first victim of Trump with punitive tariffs on aluminium imports, and Europe had its first encounter with Vice-President JD Vance this week at a Paris summit on artificial intelligence where he staked the US’s claim to dominance in the field and refused to sign an agreement to align on developing and regulating the technology.
So far, the department of international relations has found succour from EU diplomats who released a one-minute video on X on Tuesday in which they reiterated their commitment to a politics of constitutionality, equality, solidarity and sustainability.
The EU’s deputy ambassador to Pretoria, Pencho Garrido Ruiz, said the bloc shared with South Africa a belief in these principles, adding pointedly: “You can rely on the European Union during the G20 this year, during 2025, and beyond.”
The message came after European Council president Antonio Costa said the EU was committed to deepening ties with South Africa, as a “reliable and predictable” partner.
“I expressed the EU’s full support to South Africa’s leadership of @g20org and its ambition to strengthen multilateral cooperation and the Pact for the Future to address the most pressing global issues,” Costa said in a post on X after a phone call with Ramaphosa.
Costa has since met Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a similar gesture of solidarity.
The EU’s endorsement was a big comfort, said a senior diplomat, who described the two upcoming G20 meetings as a crucible that could show whether South Africa stands alone in a world Trump is trying to bend to his whim or will emerge as part of a mainstream family of disaffected nations.
The second scenario demanded skill and restraint from Ramaphosa, his ministers and sherpas but was the more likely one, he predicted.
A senior international relations official said the timing and tone of Rubio’s announcement was in some way salutary. The snub by Rubio spared South Africa the distraction of ongoing speculation as to whether he would attend. It also confirmed that Washington was likely to treat the G20 under its first African presidency with disdain. “It’s clear that he is not coming, it is clear where America stands and we can now get on with the work at hand.”
The challenge was to do so without appearing to alienate or isolate the US while Republican congress members pressed for further sanctions against South Africa after Trump suspended donor funding.
In several ministries, officials say they expect South Africa will be denied duty free access to US markets in negotiations on extending the African Growth and Opportunity Act beyond its 2025 cut-off date.
At a press briefing on Tuesday, Trump deflected a question about his attending the G20 leaders’ summit in South Africa in November.
“Let’s see what happens, but the South African situation is very, very dangerous and very bad for a lot of people,” he said. “There is tremendously bad things going on, including the confiscation of property and worse, much worse than that. You know what I’m talking about.”
AgriSA chief executive Johann Kotze in an interview with Bloomberg countered that the actual danger was in Trump’s fiction of Afrikaner dispossession. He said it was threatening the economic success of the organised farming and fuelling racial tension. “The radicalism that took place after Trump’s statement, that fuels hatred.”
Solidarity and the Institute for Race Relations’ schadenfreude at the diplomatic row and demands that Ramaphosa rethink all forms of racial redress were perhaps inevitable. But the government has also heard suggestions from some captains of industry that this was a crisis of its own making.
Along with the Democratic Alliance’s court application to have the Expropriation Act struck down, this complicates the president’s plans to convey a clear message to Washington — be it through an official delegation or the back channels diplomats and supportive business leaders are using to plead the country’s case.
Ramaphosa’s room to manoeuvre in this regard was always limited, a source close to these diplomatic efforts said, because there is no feasible concession South Africa can or will make to appease Trump.
His attack on racial redress was at once a pretext and patent dog whistle to his white supremacist supporters. And rethinking the country’s position on Israel while its genocide case is pending ruling before the International Court of Justice, the true affront in Trump’s eyes, is a proposition that does not arise now or ever.
It would be an unthinkable betrayal of principle and historic allegiance to Palestine, and cost Ramaphosa his integrity as he argues from the G20 platform for a rules-based international order.