The benefit for South Africa will be that during Trump’s four years in office the country will not lose the US as a trading partner, however unfair that partner is.
The moment that the whole of South Africa waited for with bated breath eventually arrived in the Oval Office of the White House last week.
So much can be said about whether US President Donald Trump’s ambush of President Cyril Ramaphosa worked or not.
It certainly created the dramatic moment that he wanted, but did not really play out to be the equivalent of the embarrassing dressing down that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky received on his visit a short while ago.
With all that said and done, what did the moment mean for South Africa going forward? It meant that the country has been given another chance to redefine itself and position itself for economic growth.
In the praise and backslapping that followed Johann Rupert’s speech in front of Trump, it could have just easily been forgotten that the makeshift group that the diplomat in Ramaphosa cobbled together to appear before Trump had one job and one job only: prevent South Africa from becoming Trump’s latest example to the world of how irrational he can be by unfairly punishing the country for being independent and operating according to its own laws.
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And Rupert helped in going some way towards achieving this, without even being aware he was doing so.
Rupert, the South African billionaire, appealed to Trump’s ego and placated Elon Musk when he said: “We need your help, sir. We need Starlink in every police station to help fight crime.”
In his unwitting sales pitch for Musk’s Starlink, Rupert distilled the purpose of the visit to one reality: reducing the crime rate in the country. That is what South Africa needs to turn itself around.
That not only made the meeting worthwhile for South Africa, it removed the audience from focusing on the sideshow around the 59 well-fed refugees and brought their attention back to making life comfortable for the 60 million plus patriots who have no get-out-of-jail refugee status card to turn to.
That moment of clarity by Rupert interrupted a carefully orchestrated smear campaign against South Africa that took advantage of the country’s soaring crime levels, especially the murder rate by announcing an imaginary murder rate to the world.
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The campaign was clear: twist the murder rate statistics and invent a genocide, offer refugee status to a handful of Afrikaners, isolate the country economically and make it hard for its people to trade with the US, take away the country’s agency and make it hard for it to side with the US’ enemies and finally, when the time is right, offer to make everything right only if SA accepts trade terms that compromise the black empowerment laws.
In the four years that Trump is in the White House, Starlink will probably railroad its way into South Africa and concessions will be made around broad-based black economic empowerment laws, despite the shrieking objections of Julius Malema and a lot of other people.
The benefit for South Africa will be in that four years the country will not lose the United States as a trading partner, however unfair that trading partner is.
The little economic growth and stability that come from that will allow a focused Ramaphosa to fight this insane crime rate which is allowing this genocide conspiracy to play out in the first place.
So, Rupert’s sales pitch will have worked for both Musk and the country. Only ideologues will see Ramaphosa as a weakling because he chose the pragmatism of appeasing an unpredictable and temperamental leader so this country can survive these four years.
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