South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has been flooded with advice about what to offer to US President Donald Trump when they meet on Wednesday, including oil deals, trade arrangements, Starlink and many others. But sage businesspeople are hoping for something different: they hope the meeting will be drama free.
What Ramaphosa should aim for is not a grand deal of some kind, but just an opening of the way and a breaking of the ice, setting the stage for more considered and thoughtful discussions later, says Martin Kingston, who chairs Business for South Africa. What nobody wants is a showdown or a confrontation; everybody has in the back of their minds the disastrous meeting between Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Ramaphosa will be accompanied by minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, trade, industry and competition minister Parks Tau, international relations minister Ronald Lamola and agriculture minister John Steenhuisen.
Steenhuisen has already said he would like to propose an agricultural trade deal to take the place of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which is almost certain to be scrapped when it expires later this year.
Press reports suggest South African officials have been preparing a trade proposal to present to Trump to reset the relationship, with one proposal being that Tesla would receive favourable tariffs on its imports into South Africa in exchange for building electric vehicle charging stations.
‘Adept and charismatic’
Kingston has poured cold water on these ideas saying it’s probably unrealistic to expect something so ambitious, especially given the distance between the two sides.
“But I do think that two things can happen. I think the first is that he can break the ice with his counterpart in the US. And my personal view is that if anybody can do that, Ramaphosa can. He’s pretty adept, very charismatic. And he knows how to deal with complicated situations and people,” he says.
“The second thing is that I’d like to believe that they will agree to a way forward. [What] I mean by that is that they’ll give themselves some time to address issues of substance that arise between two countries. And we know, broadly speaking, what they are.”
They should agree to be open to persuasion as to differing perspectives because we know that in certain areas, particularly geopolitical ones, these differ. “Some of that is about how it is characterised and couched, and some of it is about substance and principle,” says Kingston.
“I think resetting the arrangements around trade and investment is long overdue anyway,” he adds, but that would require more in-depth discussions.
On the investment environment, he says he’d be surprised if the president doesn’t give those assurances, “because that lies at the very heart of structural reform in the work that we’re doing in partnership with the government”.
“So he should be able to give the requisite reassurances to President Trump, both in terms of existing American investors, including the 600-plus American companies that operate in South Africa.”
And then thirdly, uh, “the environmental issues” around targeting Afrikaner farmers and expropriation without compensation. “It seems to me that that’s a matter of clarification because from my own understanding, the interpretation in America is not an accurate reflection of facts at all,” says Kingston.
No businesspeople will be accompanying Ramaphosa’s team, though several preparatory trips have taken place, including one in which Kingston participated. One of the functions of the trip will be to establish the role of former deputy finance minister and now special envoy to the US, Mcebisi Jonas.
Top composite image: US President Donald Trump (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (Buda Mendes/Getty Images for Global Citizen).
Sign up to Currency’s weekly newsletters to receive your own bulletin of weekday news and weekend treats. Register here.
