“The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole,” says Warren Buffett, “is to stop digging."
The Sage of Omaha could have been referring to South Africa in its relationship with President Donald Trump’s US. But instead of trying to find common ground, Pretoria, urged on by the Brics countries and its own ideological tendencies, is looking for a bigger spade. If it does not stop digging, however, this will come at a tremendous cost, given that the US remains one quarter of the global economy.
South Africa’s failure to manage this bilateral relationship has led to a further rupture in the relationship with the issuance of Trump’s Executive Order 14204, “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa”.
The executive order follows an impasse over US demands that South Africa address “government-sponsored discrimination against the Afrikaners and other minority populations in South Africa, including race-based discriminatory legislation, threats of land expropriation without compensation and incitement of racial violence through dehumanising chants and slogans”.
The consequences are, for now, relatively mild, and amount to visa restrictions for those “responsible for, or complicit in, the enactment or implementation of laws or policies that enable uncompensated land seizures, race-based discrimination, and/or the incitement of imminent violence against members of minority ethnic or racial groups in South Africa”.
Exactly who is covered by these restrictions remains uncertain, but this is more of a warning shot that presages greater action in the future.
South Africa has responded to the restrictions with outrage, saying that it has the “sovereign right to put in place laws that address the nation’s concern over centuries of racial injustice”.
International relations and co-operation minister Ronald Lamola says the US should respect South Africa’s sovereignty rather than take “unilateral action”.
The latest actions follow the failure of the country to address US concerns in three areas:
- Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), which the US regards as race discrimination;
- legislation enabling expropriation without compensation; and
- the failure to respond to the usage of the “Kill the Boer” struggle slogan and the continuation of farm murders.
The US measures have been received with mixed feelings in the country. Kallie Kriel of Afriforum said the US action “is specifically directed at politicians and others guilty of gross human rights violations against minorities and Afrikaners”.
Others have said that Kriel does not speak for all Afrikaners and that some support the need for legislative redress of inequities resulting from apartheid.
But the real problem is the absence of any serious strategy to repair the country’s relationship with Washington and the default setting to still more digging.
Little headway
Pretoria had tried to ameliorate US relations by posting Roelf Meyer to Washington to persuade the Trump administration of its bona fides. While Meyer has been well received, he has made little headway as his mandate appears not to allow him to make concessions in these areas to attempt to talk the administration into allowing the country to continue with its existing legal and policy approach.
Meanwhile, there is broad agreement back home that South Africa’s BEE legislation has failed to deliver, with joblessness among black youth rising and economic growth stagnating as greenfield investors stay away. Instead of reviewing the policy and coming up with a more dynamic approach, the ANC sees the failed BEE architecture as untouchable.
Legislation enabling appropriation without compensation, which was passed by the previous parliament, in which the ANC had a majority, was signed into law instead of a new debate being allowed that reflected the change in the composition of parliament following the most recent election, in which the ANC lost its majority.
Only a feverish minority on the extreme would go to the trenches to defend the use of the “Kill the Boer” slogan, but the ANC appears unable to decisively intervene to signal to farmers that they are not legitimate targets of violence.
In short, the ANC is holding onto a policy and legislative agenda that has passed its sell-by date and is using the notion of “sovereignty” to defend an agenda that should be reformed to better serve South Africans, never mind please the US. It was, after all, the voters of South Africa, and not the US, that rejected this agenda in the most recent election.
The road to rebuilding the relationship with the US is alluringly simple. It requires the government to start addressing concerns about these policies and empowering Meyer to present to the US an actual reform agenda.
Protecting its patronage networks
This could include a thorough review of BEE to ensure that empowerment means job creation and entrepreneurial stimulation, a clear denunciation of the use of the “Kill the Boer” slogan and visible action to deter farm murders and protect rural communities.
The real stickler here is the BEE legislation. The ANC’s entire patronage network of tenderpreneurs benefits from the cover of BEE to channel state resources into elite enrichment, as has been so apparent at the Madlanga Commission hearings and before that at those of the Zondo Commission. The ANC fears that an end to the present BEE scheme, which benefits the political elite at the expense of the general population, would further weaken its unsteady political base.
The trouble is that the whole country is being forced to pay for this determination to hold on to failed laws and policies.
For now, the US has just targeted those directly involved with visa restrictions. If no action is taken to alter course, the next set of actions will bite deeper. And, eventually, the US will come for South Africa’s banking and commercial relationships, with dire consequences.
But instead of developing a pragmatic reform agenda that voters want, the ANC is doubling down. It openly ties its future to the Brics bloc, where it joins Russia and China among other authoritarians in criticising US foreign policy about Israel and elsewhere. This is going to add very little to South Africa’s unemployed; to the contrary, it is likely to diminish their chances given the age-old relationship between investment, growth and jobs.
Stop digging and start patching together the relationship with the US. It’s not about global solidarity but about domestic priorities. With little economic growth and surging unemployment, the country can only slip further into the hole.
