President Cyril Ramaphosa is welcomed by Minister Ronald Lamola at the South African embassy in Washington. (GovernmentZA/X)
President Cyril Ramaphosa is meeting his US counterpart on Wednesday against a backdrop of three months of diplomatic tension.
The meeting is the result of extensive spade work from South Africa’s side since Donald Trump declared diplomatic war on the country in February in an executive order suspending all aid to the country in retaliation for official policies of racial redress.
Tensions have only escalated since, and there have been media reports that Ramaphosa’s aides have sought to prevent an Oval Office showdown similar to the humiliation experienced by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on 28 February.
Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, said there were several topics on the agenda for Wednesday’s meeting at the White House, including South Africa’s year-long presidency of the G20 and the barbs the Trump administration has hurled at South Africa about the country’s official state policy of racial redress.
Ramaphosa intended to use his meeting with the US president to reiterate his invitation to Trump to attend the G20 leaders’ summit in Johannesburg in November.
Trump has indicated that he may well not do so, posting on his social media platform Truth Social in mid-April that he could not be expected to do so when the government was, he claimed, expropriating white-owned land and persecuting the descendants of white settlers.
He asked rhetorically how he could be expected to attend the summit “when land confiscation and genocide is the primary topic of conversation?”
Ramaphosa’s office has, for months, described his remarks and executive orders to this effect as informed by a campaign of disinformation.
The hard-won visit comes just over a week after 49 South Africans arrived in the US as beneficiaries of Trump’s special dispensation for asylum for victims of alleged persecution.
Magwenya said Ramaphosa would not only again invite Trump to attend the G20 summit but hoped that his presence in South Africa would suffice to persuade him that no race group was subject to persecution.
“We hope that he will use that opportunity to see for himself that there is no truth to the propaganda around racial persecution in our country,” he said.
The narrative is not new. Trump alleged racial persecution in South Africa in 2018, during his first term. Among the commentators who contradicted him at the time was Witney Schneidman, one of the authors of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), and a former US assistant deputy secretary of state for African affairs.
Trump’s stance has been widely attributed to a campaign by Breitbart News editor Joel Pollak to discredit the country’s domestic and foreign policy.
Pollak’s agitation in recent months was widely seen as a second audition for the post of ambassador to South Africa. He was again overlooked. Trump instead nominated right-wing media critic Leo Bozell.
South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled in March after calling Trump a white supremacist. Ramaphosa has yet to name a replacement, but has in the interim appointed former deputy finance minister and current MTN chairperson Mcebisi Jonas as his special envoy to the US capitol.
Jonas is accompanying the presidential delegation to Washington on what is his maiden voyage in that capacity. His special brief is to shore up crucial trade ties with the US, in the likelihood that South Africa will be excluded if Agoa is expanded beyond its natural lifespan, which expires later this year.
Ramaphosa is also accompanied by International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola, Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen and Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Parks Tau, who have for months been drafting a bilateral trade pact with the US which will be put on the table during this visit.