Key topics
- SAâs racial laws and BEE policies mirror apartheid-era legal discrimination.
- Pretoriaâs foreign policy risks US ties, threatening AGOA and key industries.
- Diplomatic missteps may devastate SAâs economy, especially the car industry.
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By RW Johnson ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
The recent exchanges between Trump, Musk and Ramaphosa have left many South Africans angrily indignant. They should save their breath. No one in Washington hears or notices what is said here. But two things hang in the air. First, as we all know, our Expropriation Act emerged from many years of angry discussion about how to âreturn the landâ to African ownership and many of its proponents, such as Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma, are openly âinspiredâ by Mugabeâs land seizures in next-door Zimbabwe. Given that background it is not surprising that this has alarmed foreign investors and Trumpâs remarks were merely a reflection of that.
Secondly, Muskâs question, âWhy does South Africa have openly racist ownership laws ?â remains essentially unanswered. True, the presidential spokesman, Vincent Magwenya, has given a doubtless one-sided account of Ramaphosaâs phone call with Musk in which he apparently argued that âSouth Africa does not have racist ownership lawsâ. Ramaphosa also insisted that South Africa âdoes not have race-based discriminationâ.
But of course, it does. Sure, sometimes this is dressed up a little by insisting on ownership by the âhistorically disadvantagedâ or other such circumlocutions, but every South African knows exactly what is meant. And there is now a huge volume of laws on the statute book which use racial criteria. The whole edifice of BEE rests upon apartheid thinking â that you canât legislate for the population as a whole but that there must be different laws for different racial groups. The only reason that Ramaphosa can insist that âthere is no race-based discriminationâ is the ANC belief that racism is a white thing, that blacks canât be racist. But of course they can.
Faced with these facts people like Mr Magwenya tend to talk about South Africaâs unique history which now needs to be reversed and corrected. The Nats used almost the same words â âour unique historyâ â to defend their policies. And of course, South Africa is by no means as unique as it thinks. What the government is really saying is that apartheid was dreadful because it was racist, but we are going to correct all that by being equally racist. Moreover, this policy looks entirely to the past. It is all about changing history. Far better to plan for a non-racial future.
Read more: đ Trump freezes US aid to South Africa as tension escalates
What Ramaphosa and Magwenya miss entirely is that apartheid was universally condemned because it codified racial differences into law. Everywhere in the world private individuals and sometimes social groups might have racial preferences of one kind or another. This was inevitable and often harmless â life went on whether a particular neighbourhood was racially mixed or whether some group or another particularly chose to live there. But what made apartheid so objectionable was that it formalised such practices into inflexible laws and then enforced them. Even today whites mainly marry whites and blacks mainly marry blacks â and no one cares. But apartheid made racial inter-marriage illegal, allowed no private freedom and by its prohibition clearly cast certain groups as inferior and unacceptable. This met with universal revulsion.
It is because the government has lost sight of how unacceptable it is to translate such informal preferences into inflexible laws that it simply fails to realise how offensive outsiders find it to be told that if they want to invest here they must employ people not on merit but in terms of which racial groups they come from, or that they must set aside 30% of their investment and give it to a group defined by the colour of its skin. All this in order to address inequalities which these outsiders did nothing to create. Moreover, the ANC government itself has greatly increased inequality in South Africa during its term of office. So where exactly is the sense in these policies ?
At present there is a lot of discussion of Elon Muskâs Starlink which offers much faster, much cheaper and truly universal internet. Little wonder that African countries are scrambling to gain access to this technological wonder. But, when Ramaphosa raised the subject with Musk he began by âexplainingâ how it was legally necessary for SpaceX (the parent company) to âparticipateâ in BEE. This was classic apartheid reasoning in which openly racist provisions are depicted as parts of the local culture, as if they were tablets handed down in stone. Musk, quite reasonably, said âwell, change the lawsâ â and the conversation stopped there.
The result is a frantic search for some way round. If Musk absolutely refuses to give away 30% of his equity â and who can blame him â then perhaps some other way, some âequity equivalentâ, can be found whereby Musk gives away much the same amount without it affecting ownership. This all smacks of the same old apartheid mentality. The Japanese can be legislated to be regarded as âhonorary whitesâ and then Taiwanese can be legislated to be âhonorary Japaneseâ. That is, all manner of ridiculous amendments can be made to reality provided the sanctity of apartheid law â or BEE law – is retained.
Quite why Musk should be interested in other ingenious ways of relieving him of 30% of his investment remains unexplained. Heâs already offering faster internet far cheaper than anyone else and can get it to the most remote areas. Other African countries think that that is bargain enough. Only South Africa thinks he âoughtâ to give away large amounts of money in gratitude for getting the contract.
What all these ridiculous attempts to amend reality have in common is a bone-headed parochialism, that some particular legal concoction based on race can be worked out in South Africa and that this must then be taken as the reasonable basis for all future discussion. In order to further dignify the thing, there is then much talk of how carefully all of these rules are administered by judges and lawyers in gowns etc.
In much the same way, some South Africans took great pride in the dignified flummery of the ICC for South Africaâs âgenocideâ case against Israel, and there was certainly a lot of dressing up in gowns and play-acting in that case. But the realpolitik of it, of course, was that South Africa was taking sides against a country which had just been attacked in a major atrocity and which had powerful friends. The end result is that Pretoria has earned the enmity of the current American administration.
There is no point in complaining about the mistakes and misrepresentations in Trumpâs tirade against South Africa. Countries, like people, give general impressions and for some time now Pretoria has been warned that it was sending very hostile signals to the USA. Yet it persevered on that path. The result has already been the loss of $400 million a year in US aid, plus the undermining of South Africaâs chairmanship of the G20. It also seems more than likely to result in the cancellation of our AGOA privileges. This could sink the local car industry, destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs and hugely advance South Africaâs de-industrialisation. If this happens it will be the heaviest body-blow that South Africa has suffered since the withdrawal of loans by Chase Manhattan in 1985 â which ultimately doomed apartheid.
Read more: Rubio says heâll skip G20 meeting in South Africa over land law
The whole point of diplomacy should be to ensure that avoidable disasters like this donât happen. And it didnât need to happen. We didnât have to allow the Lady R to dock here. We didnât have to carry out joint naval exercises with the Chinese and Russians. We didnât need to refuse to criticise the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And we didnât need to lead even the Muslim and Arab worlds in their attacks on Israel. We didnât need to befriend Iran or hob-nob with Hamas and Hezbollah. As they say in the trade union world, there is no compensation payable under the Industrial Injuries Act for the self-inflicted wound.
The fact is that in foreign policy terms South Africa has for some time been looking for a fight. By appointing a foreign minister as foolish as Naledi Pandor, who made no secret of her closeness to Hamas and Hezbollah, South Africa was taking a major national security risk. Over and over again journalistic commentators warned that adopting a foreign policy so provocative to our major trading partners was liable to bring extremely unhappy consequences. All this was ignored and foreign policy was conducted as if we were playing student union politics.
Now the consequences have arrived and, of course, such fights are never on quite the terms one would choose. The government, the DA and Afriforum are all sending âhigh-power delegationsâ to Washington. It is most unlikely that they will get to see either Trump or Rubio. The truth is that itâs all rather too late for such missions. If South Africa wanted to avoid antagonizing US opinion it should have been paying attention and acting differently for several years past. When even highly sympathetic US Senators like Chris Coons began expressing their exasperation with Pretoriaâs behaviour, the writing was on the wall.
It would also be sensible to recall Ibrahim Rasool as our ambassador to the US. Pretoria seems not to have understood how needlessly provocative it is to ask Trump to accept an ambassador who is openly a friend of Hamas and Hezbollah. If we wait for Trump to kick him out that will simply further worsen relations with the US.
If our AGOA deal gets cancelled â and it is hard to imagine any other result â the damage to South Africaâs car industry could devastate the Eastern Cape, create huge further unemployment and threaten the breakdown of public order. For this is not student union politics, itâs playing geo-politics in the real world where the stakes are really high. The government needs to think hard about our national interests and be willing to abandon policies that get in the way of that. Continuing to insist that we alone have got things right would merely leave us in the position of the proud mother watching her son in the military parade: âWhy, theyâre all out of step except our Johnny.â
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