The contentious issues between South Africa and the United States (US) are now very well understood. Race-based policy and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) in particular, South Africa’s record on human rights which is now indelibly personified by a ten-thousands strong army in red signing ‘Kill the Boer, pow, pow’ with complete impunity, and South Africa’s one-eyed diplomatic posturing against Israel whilst remaining intentionally blind to the numerous sins of China, Russia, and Iran.
South Africa’s GNU has steered straight into the storm with reckless and at times gleeful abandon. The outcome will now be economic carnage as South Africa’s already endangered exporters desperately attempt to recalibrate to the punitive tariffs which the GNU has all but begged for.
South African government increasingly irrelevant
Chaos and opportunity are time honoured bedfellows. On account of their ideological belligerence and no small amount of ineptitude, the departments of International Relations (DIRCO) and the Trade and Industry (DTI) have been elbowed to the margins. In their place, an informal network of activists, businessmen, and opportunistic politicians has arisen. The real discussions between South Africa and the United States no longer involve the South African Government.
Numerous unofficial delegations have visited Washington, no small number of Americans have visited South Africa, and to their own considerable chagrin, the South Africa Government no longer has any control over how it is perceived in the US. It can’t even find an acceptable Ambassador and has become flotsam in the sea of propaganda.
How Washington is thinking
In this context, I was invited to attend a conference at Stellenbosch University. It was sponsored by a Dutch foundation, conducted in Afrikaans, and titled “‘The USA in a new international order”. The keynote speaker was Joshua Meservey, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute in Washington. None of the many academics who addressed the conference wasted time on the future role of the South African Government, its irrelevance is becoming contagious. There was a relatively modest audience in attendance, but to my direct knowledge, it included participants in at least three unrelated delegations to Washington so far this year. That is quite something!
Merservey spoke on “Washington dynamics and the USA in Africa”. After providing insights into the Trump 2.0 regime, he addressed its implications for Africa. The US has two tariff components: a baseline tariff designed to re-order the system of global trade into one considered more equitable to the US, and reciprocal tariffs designed to protect US interests from the harmful actions of the states they are levied against.
Unsurprisingly, as a self-appointed antagonist-in-chief of the US, an ideological hypocrite, and a fawning friend to states-gone-rogue, South Africa got both. Meservey offered a palate of possible solutions. BEE is a serious non-tariff trade barrier to US companies which ‘equivalence’ does not negate. DEI is firmly in the crosshairs of the anti-woke Trump administration and the US is not buying its ‘necessity in uplifting black people’ given the destruction it has wreaked on the South African economy. Property rights are of paramount importance to economic prosperity and growth. In short, South Africa simply cannot carry on down its current path and imagine it can find any palatable proposal to appease the US.
What must western communities in SA do?
I asked Meservey, “What did he believe western leaning communities in South Africa should do?”, pointing out that we agree with the US on every one of these points. We despise our government more than they ever could, it doesn’t speak for us, but we have no legislated means by which to command it.
Meservey’s response was enlightening and insightful.
Momentarily he was stunned. It is one thing to provide objective analysis of a situation, it is quite another to be asked to step into the shoes of the participants. In that moment, I imagine that Meservey came face-to-face, perhaps for the first time, with the infuriating and soul destroying impotence of belonging to a marginalised cultural minority in a democratic unitary state. It is no place for the meek of heart.
When he spoke, he could have been reading the Cape Independence playbook. The US doesn’t fully comprehend the distinctions between South Africa’s western and non-western communities. It is really important that western communities work hard to articulate and emphasise these differences, and those communities need to demonstrate their value to the US. Your leaders need to be much more outspoken.
It was hard at that point not to imagine Rampahosa’s “white friends” being paraded around the White House like the latest Russian at Mavericks. If only Steenhuisen could have found the courage to say “Donald, don’t listen to this smarmy two-faced socialist deceiver who has made a R6.4bn fortune out of BEE, his blackness, and his political connections”. If only Rupert had chosen to describe the bloodcurdling significance of each cross at the ‘Witkruis Monument’ instead of regaling the President with tales of how he sleeps with open doors in his multi-million dollar Franschhoek estate protected by electrified fences and a private army. Instead, they sold us out and prioritised their own interests over ours.
Sub-national solutions
But I digress. Most interestingly of all, Meservey revealed that there is now some chatter and an emerging school of thought in Washington that the solution to South Africa - US relations may be what he described as ‘sub-national’, with the Western Cape front and centre in such thinking. As someone who spent five weeks in Washington earlier this year advancing precisely this line of thinking, it was music to my ears.
Cape Independence would deliver the US a key Western ally in Southern Africa, enhanced and BEE free trading opportunities, the unhindered use of the Cape Sea Route which is crucial to US shipping interests especially when the Suez Canal is compromised, potential use of the Simonstown Naval Base, and even access to Antarctica.
Tantalisingly, even the current constitutional dispensation apportions trade as a Schedule 4 concurrent power, meaning that the Western Cape can pass its own trade legislation and develop its own trade policies. Through Wesgro and other initiatives, it has already charted a divergent path from the rest of South Africa. It has distinctly different patterns of trade, different trading partners, and as a result, has an unemployment rate roughly half of that of the rest of the country.
In recent years, the Western Cape has been increasingly willing to selectively rock the boat on issues such as the war in Ukraine. The US is now almost inviting it to strike out on its own. Initially perhaps as part of the current constitutional order, but in the final reckoning, if an end to race-based policies, a U-turn on foreign policy, and the protection of minority communities and property rights are the keys to our prosperity, then Cape Independence is where we must end.
Alan Winde, I hope you are listening, because as you know all too well, the GNU is not working - and it never will!
* Originally published on Politicsweb
