President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent encounter at the White House revealed that South Africans have all succumbed to “Trump derangement syndrome” in varying different degrees, writes Tony Leon.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa went to the White House on a “working visit” to meet the US president and nothing much happened. No one in the world, least of all the media, paid it much attention.

The White House readout of the event was all of two paragraphs, couched in diplomatic banalities and cliched euphemisms which invited against further enquiry.

This is not a fever dream but a fair summary of Ramaphosa’s penultimate pow-wow with a US president. However, back in mid-September 2022, the man Ramaphosa faced in the Oval Office was Joe Biden.

Beyond the likely meeting of minds between the two heads of state, the state of Biden’s mind at that time is now the subject of a riveting new book. Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and his Disastrous Choice to Run Again by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.

The contents of that book, released last week, deal with a conspiracy of concealment by Biden’s top aides and family of his mental and physical impairment during his presidency. It almost knocked, just for once, his successor, Donald Trump, off the front pages and television screens of the US and the world.

But the meeting last Wednesday between the same Ramaphosa in the same venue with a very different US president, restored Trump to his preferred place at the epicentre of world and US media attention.

Very few South Africans back in September 2022 paid the slightest attention to Ramaphosa’s White House visit. By contrast, the frenzied following of each excruciating frame of the White House spectacle last week by most South Africans proved the performative power and grip which Trump holds on us all.

The lofty Financial Times described last Wednesday’s Trump-Ramaphosa meeting as “an hour of ignominy” and called the event “a ritualised humiliation… an ambush”.

Members of “Team SA” who participated in the “ambush” were more upbeat, calling the visit “a success”. I suppose considering the low bar of the shouting match between Trump, his Vice President JD Vance and a previous guest, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, it was.

At least Ramaphosa and his team were served lunch and weren’t thrown out of the White House. Of course Ramaphosa was properly suited up for the occasion, kept his cool and sufficiently debased himself by flattering his host’s Oval office redecorations.

 

Ace in the hole

The ace in the hole, as it were, was including in his entourage the two sorts of people Trump reveres most: One dollar billionaire and two top professional golfers. Even if Team SA’s racial composition meant the ANC’s domestic obsession with racial percentages were left at home.

The full effect of last week’s meeting will not be known for some time. Presumably if SA manages on 9 July to have the swingeing 30% tariff on its US exports cut by two thirds, and if Trump honours (not a word much used about him) his commitment to attend the G20 summit in November in Johannesburg, then the made for MAGA spectacle last week would be a small downpayment however cringeworthy it was.

In different degrees we have all succumbed to “Trump derangement syndrome”. The White House meeting was top of mind, for example, at a panel discussion in which I participated last weekend at the Kingsmead Book Fair in Johannesburg. Billed as a discussion on the GNU and my new book on topic, the Trump-Ramaphosa confrontation was top of mind for both discussants and audience.

I was, though, quite surprised when one of my fellow panellists, senior government mandarin Busani Ngcaweni, who served for 15 years in the Presidency, advised us that every possible scenario in the White House event was “game planned” in advance of the meeting. Far from the “ambush” the FT wrote about, on his version, every contingency was anticipated, bar perhaps the grim film footage Trump delighted in showing his guests and the wider world.

The problem here, of course, that to rebut the fallacious “white genocide” trope, the defence offered by Ramaphosa’s team was to say, often in lurid detail, that the whole of South Africa, and not just white-owned farms, is one giant crime scene.

With no fewer than 630 000 murders occurring here in the 31 years of ANC rule, this is no less than the truth.

But as a best defence to the notoriously fact-averse US president, the image offered to him and the world, hardly reassured.

 

Trashed reputation 

Once again, the Financial Times was on the money when it editorialised: “For the neutral observer – and potential tourist and investor – South Africa’s reputation was ritually trashed in prime time. The entire optics of the event, in which Trump deferred to white golfers over a black president and cabinet ministers, evoked nasty echoes of apartheid.”

But there was another echo from the apartheid years and a long forgotten presidential summit which also resonated. And offered a more optimistic possibility for the future.

Back in August 1971, when the dark night of apartheid shrouded the country and its rulers in an incubus of isolation, hardline prime minister John Vorster invited Malawian president Hastings Banda to Johannesburg where he was lavished with the pomp of a state visit and banquet at the President Hotel. Just how unusual this was – a white prime minister in rigidly and racially segregated SA seated next to and toasting a black head of state on equal terms, did not go unnoticed.

Vorster’s extreme right-wing opponents in the fringe Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP) rushed out an alarmist pamphlet which depicted apartheid – which it fully supported – as a brick wall. It used the Banda-Vorster photo as one brick taken out of the same wall. It ominously warned that once one brick was removed, soon enough another would go and eventually the entire edifice would come tumbling down.

Though the time line was longer than the conspiracist HNP anticipated, on the direction of travel, the party was correct. In addition to human suffering, apartheid defied the laws of economics. And when one concession was offered, such as racially mixed hotels, another soon enough appeared, such as desegregated workforces, then followed the removal of the pass laws, and so it went – midst of struggle and strife – until it could not be sustained.

 

SA’s grim realities highlighted 

In very different circumstances, the Trump reality show last week, highlighted significant grim realities here at home. The concessions thrown at him, to stave off further economic punishment, such as a concession on Starlink, point to the economic and political absurdity of BEE as currently practised. In essence: cheaper access for rural poor people via cheap internet access or further millions for connected party cadres via forced equity share sales? Elon Musk might not be an attractive individual but his power and proximity to Trump could force a change of direction here.

Governance expert Professor William Gumede, noted in a weekend article that over R1 trillion has been distributed to BEE beneficiaries over the past decades. But the beneficiaries are the few not the many: “The current version of BEE has only enriched a handful of people politically connected to the ANC.”

Every recent poll, never mind Elon Musk, suggests most South African voters, including ANC supporters, no longer support this shakedown. But everyone wants a fair shake to get ahead and improve their life chances.

On his return home, Ramaphosa wrote that the essential purpose of his visit was to improve US-SA relations and offset the false narrative driven by “fringe groups peddling misinformation”.

Yet, wonder of wonders, another headline on Monday proclaimed, “US meeting spurs SA into action over high crime rate”.

If the White House “ambush” achieves real action on the crime front and throws a few bricks out of the wall of ANC’s job-crushing anti-growth barricade, then the brute force of Trump might achieve unintended outcomes.