Letter: Ramaphosa’s misguided hubris - Business Day

If SA losing American aid, possibly being frozen out of American trade privileges and even being hit with American sanctions prompts our concern, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s comments at last Thursday’s Goldman Sachs conference should have us positively apoplectic.

After the dust settles he wants to “do a deal” with US President Donald Trump. “We don’t want to go and explain ourselves,” Ramaphosa said, “we want to go and do a meaningful deal with the US on a whole range of issues. I’m very positively inclined to promoting a good relationship with President Trump.”

It’s good that he’s moving away from relying on explanations to resolve the current impasse. SA’s positions are amply known, and in the geopolitical space this includes a long-standing hostility to the US and many of its key allies.

The word is that the SA government — specifically the ANC component of it — will simply not get a meeting.

Mere hours before mounting the stage for Goldman Sachs Ramaphosa had lent his name to a pugilistic piece in Foreign Policy the overall message of which was that no compromises would be entertained, with an attack on Trump for good measure. What was that about waiting for the dust to settle?

The harsh reality is that SA has been engaged in geopolitical brinkmanship against the US for years (it’s not a “Trump” thing), but without the heft or diplomatic capacity or global alliances to shield or cushion it from the fallout. It’s unclear whether there is any deal to be made, or whether the president and his colleagues could find it in their ideological repertoire to make one. Experience is not encouraging.

The president’s performance illustrates a deeply damaging hubris. Sadly, it’s not uncommon to our politics, foreign or domestic: we assume contradictory messages can assuage conflicting interests, that those we damn as enemies will rally “for the good of the country” (as we define it, naturally), that endless promises and windy rhetoric substitute for results, which we are perpetually “working towards”.

With so much at stake now, we should understand that this approach is a nonstarter.

Terence Corrigan
Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/letters/2025-03-03-letter-ramaphosas-misguided-hubris/