Polgreen: Trump wanted spectacle not statecraft with South Africa’s president ...Middle East

It might sound improbable in light of the bizarre encounter that unfolded in the Oval Office on Wednesday, but President Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, actually have quite a few things in common. Both are lavishly wealthy business tycoons who coveted, then achieved, rather late in life, the highest office in their land. Both share a taste for the refined leisure of the moneyed global elite — golf for Trump, fly fishing for Ramaphosa.

But most important, both built their formidable reputations on a knack for making deals. In Trump’s case, this usually involved real estate: hotels, casinos, luxury condominiums. Ramaphosa, for his part, was central to one of the most celebrated deals of the 20th century: He was the lead negotiator in the talks that brought an end to apartheid in South Africa.

Ramaphosa and his party, the African National Congress, achieved this remarkable feat in no small part through his uncommon knack for finding common ground and a willingness to make hard choices and big sacrifices to achieve peace with a sworn enemy. Sure, Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, leaders of their respective parties, got the Nobel Peace Prize. But Ramaphosa, relentless and charming in equal measure, played a critical role in getting the deal over the finish line.

Spectacle not statecraft

So it is perhaps not surprising that Ramaphosa, a debonair statesman who does not lack confidence in his abilities, thought he could bring his considerable talents to the Oval Office and at least begin the process of making some kind of deal with the man who thinks of himself as the king of deals. Instead, Trump hijacked the meeting to focus on a racist fantasy of White South Africans suffering genocide at the hands of a Black majority.

As spectacle, it was grimly riveting. As statecraft, it was deeply damaging.

It’s not like there wasn’t anything serious to talk about. The two countries are at odds over a range of issues — South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, tariffs, aid cuts to the country’s most vulnerable citizens — that would benefit from reasoned discussion. But Trump had clearly planned to ambush Ramaphosa, bringing in a television screen and dimming the lights to show a video of an opposition party leader, Julius Malema, leading a crowd in a chant, “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer,” that Trump and his allies claim supports their view that White people face genocidal violence in South Africa.

It was, to say the least, misleading.

Malema, a notorious gadfly and former leader of the youth wing of the African National Congress, was long ago expelled amid a storm of fights with the party’s leaders. His party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, advocates the broad seizure and redistribution of White land without compensation, a policy that the ANC has long rejected. Trump might point to the law that allows the government to seize land “for a public purpose or in the public interest,” but the government so far has not done so without compensation.

New boogeyman

In the South Africa of the Trumpist fever dream, in which a bloodthirsty Black majority seeks vengeance against Whites by taking their land and even their lives, EFF would be wildly popular. But in last year’s general election in the real South Africa, it was in some ways the biggest loser, slipping from third to fourth largest party in parliament.

Indeed, the White landowner is no longer a reliable political boogeyman.

When I went to South Africa to report on the election last May, I found that the real xenophobic rage driving politics there was directed primarily at poor migrants from other African countries, who have become convenient scapegoats for the intractable inequality that has long defined South Africa.

I heard plenty of complaints about Somali shopkeepers supposedly gouging the residents of poor townships outside Cape Town, but hardly a peep about the wealthy Afrikaner families that control vast swaths of rich farmland just a few miles away.

This is a remarkable turnabout, but its roots lie in the vaunted deal that Ramaphosa helped make to end apartheid.

The White minority that had subjugated and ruled the Black majority after expropriating their land, herding them into poor Bantustans and profiting from their cheap labor, would yield to democracy and a new constitution that would grant the right to vote to all South Africans. In exchange for political power, the fundamental economic arrangements that had concentrated virtually all of the country’s wealth in White hands would remain largely unchanged. There would be no expropriation of land, no forced divestment.

A small Black elite would get a seat at the corporate South African table, Ramaphosa among them. A small Black middle class would emerge at the edges of that elite. But the fundamental inequality baked in by apartheid — a tiny sliver of mostly White people holding the vast majority of land and wealth — would endure. A report published in The World Bank Economic Review that examined wealth distribution in South Africa from the end of apartheid to 2017 found that the top 10% of the country controls 86% of its wealth, an astonishing gap.

Perhaps this explains why Ramaphosa’s party, which had enjoyed overwhelming support from voters since the end of apartheid in 1994, finally lost its majority last year. But when faced with the choice of coalition partners to build a government, Ramaphosa shunned radical parties like the Economic Freedom Fighters, with their chants about killing farmers, and formed a coalition government with its archrival, the Democratic Alliance, a party deeply associated with White wealth.

Fake evidence

Members of that party were among the mixed-race delegation that made the trip to the White House on Wednesday, composed of politicians from Ramaphosa’s uneasy coalition government, and rounded out by a pair of famous golfers and South Africa’s richest man.

Multiple White members of the delegation tried to persuade Trump that his fears of white genocide were misplaced, that violent crime is a problem that affects all South Africans.

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Trump, theatrically waving around fake evidence of a fake problem, was unmoved. He wasn’t there to make a deal. He was there to make memes and score points with his most rabid fans.

Through all of Trump’s lies and bluster, Ramaphosa remained remarkably composed. At the end of the meeting he reminded his counterpart that later this year South Africa would play host to the Group of 20, and said he hoped Trump would attend. It was a telling reminder that the world is changing fast.

Together the G20 countries represent 80% of the global population and produce more than 85% of the world’s economic output; they will play a critical role in shaping whatever new world order emerges from this fractious era. If the United States is an unreliable partner and a source of chaos these countries will turn elsewhere, building new security and trade alliances that don’t depend on the inconstant, waning superpower. And in November, they’ll all be in South Africa.

It is folly to abandon America’s seat at that table. But, then, folly seems, more than anything, to be Trump’s stock-in-trade.

Lydia Polgreen is a New York Times columnist.

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