PETER BRUCE | Trump tantrums are a gift to Ramaphosa

US President Donald Trump has arguably done more to energise the electoral prospects of the ANC in the past two weeks than I can possibly calculate.

By declaring that no US official would attend the G20 summit in Johannesburg; then warning President Cyril Ramaphosa not to dare make a G20 declaration later today; then proposing to send the chargé d’affaires from the US embassy to accept the G20 handover and having his press secretary deeply insult Ramaphosa, he has fed the president a political lifeline the ANC could not have dreamed of at the start of November.

Suddenly Ramaphosa is declaring on TV that “we will not be bullied” and refusing to hand over the summit gavel to a junior US official, all while welcoming the leaders of the civilised world to Johannesburg. South Africans, disillusioned by vast corruption within the ANC and Ramaphosa’s lacklustre leadership, suddenly see another side of him, and they like it.

Standing up to Trump is a good thing in almost any circumstance. He is an ignorant, spiteful exhibitionist who has brought untold hardship on the world and his own country simply by releasing his inner child on them. Ramaphosa, by appearing to stand up to him, is scoring the easiest political win available to him.

We will have to see what transpires in Johannesburg today, as the summit ends. The leaked draft declaration is, for the G20, typically anodyne but still may not survive intact. G20 summits often agree on a lame final communiqué — the one in India in 2023 failed to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as did the one in Indonesia in 2022.

G20 chairs try their best, however pathetic the final result, to reach consensus, and no unanimous agreement — Trump’s threats aside — would officially mark the Johannesburg summit as a failure.

But Ramaphosa is no innocent. Trump has been yanking the South African chain all year, and our response has been exceptionally poor. We all know (and so do the Americans) that Trump’s charges of genocide are lies. And there is little point raging at the Afrikaner interest groups encouraging Trump. This is either a free country or it isn’t.

But none of this explains why we don’t have a functioning ambassador in Washington. In truth, we haven’t had one since 2021, when Nomaindia Mfeketo became ill. Her replacement was Ndumiso Ntshinga, who was a stand-in. When I reported his lowly status a few years ago, the then foreign minister Naledi Pandor wrote a letter to the Sunday Times suggesting I be relieved of my column.

Ntshinga, though, was let go when Ramaphosa appointed Ebrahim Rasool last January — he is now ambassador to Western Sahara, which doesn’t yet exist. And Rasool lasted just more than a month.

With Trump threatening South Africa again, we badly need someone in Washington able to hit the phones and counter-lobby the drivel from the White House

It is a lamentable record and all down to Ramaphosa.

With Trump threatening South Africa again, we badly need someone in Washington able to hit the phones and counter-lobby the drivel from the White House. An experienced and level-headed ambassador would be able to speak to senators and representatives, to the editors of America’s great newspapers, and get himself or herself onto Fox News when the need arises.

But we make no such efforts, and we have no-one holding the fort. Ramaphosa is supposed to be thinking about it and may try to persuade his trade & investment adviser, Alistair Ruiters, who is trying to negotiate a trade deal with the US to soften the 30% tariffs Trump imposed on us, to take the job. But Ruiters has been given little to offer that would get Trump excited and has already semi-retired with his family to Portugal.

The Rasool appointment tells us Ramaphosa wants a confidante in Washington, a reliable party “cadre”. It’s a blinkered and malignant position, but former US president Joe Biden’s forbearing attitude to South Africa — due largely to the fact that his chief of staff was married to the daughter of one of South Africa’s biggest mining families — meant it didn’t matter how poor the embassy in Washington was because we simply called the White House when we needed help.

So Ramaphosa would not have seen Trump coming, and there would have been no-one in his US embassy to alert him to the looming threat. Now he frets. Our last ambassador in China left Beijing in January, I am assured. The world’s two biggest economies, and we are not there. It is astounding.

It may not crystallise in Johannesburg today, but Ramaphosa’s diplomatic negligence will come at a price. It’s one thing to stand up to a bully but quite another to have nowhere to run if calling his bluff doesn’t work.