South Africa is attempting to court China in the wake of the Oval Office meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump last month, in which South African President Cyril Ramaphosa argued with Trump over “genocide.”
The meeting produced theatrics and commentary, but little in the way of economic progress between the two countries.
Ramaphosa arrived at the meeting determined to correct what he had called Trump’s “misinformation” about the country, but without any concrete proposals for resolving tensions and trade disputes that had emerged.
South Africa’s communications ministry, which is run by the opposition, later issued a draft policy that proposed setting aside racial ownership requirements to allow Elon Musk’s Starlink to invest in the country, but the dominant African National Congress (ANC) balked, and is now openly seeking Chinese alternatives.
Mzwandile Masina, an ANC member of Parliament who chairs the legislature’s committee on trade, said recently that Musk’s Starlink was not the only alternative for providing satellite-based Internet access, and that China and other countries were developing services of their own. These, he said, should be considered within the “existing legal framework” — i.e. without challenging South Africa’s racial ownership quotas.
China is moving aggressively within Africa to secure access to raw materials, often building infrastructure for African countries — while generously rewarding ruling elites — but controlling African nations through debt, and excluding the local population from benefit.
Ironically, Chinese investment has several features of the very colonialism and racism that African leaders decry when it comes to Western investment on the continent.
Meanwhile, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula referred to Trump as a “mental case” in criticizing the way in which he argued with Ramaphosa. ”
“The president went abroad to that mental case in America, with many saying: ‘No, don’t beg him, don’t beg him’,” Mbalula said, according to South Africa’s EWN. “How can he not ‘beg’ him? Because if that person does something else like this, lots of work done will collapse. The mental case carried on displaying befitting behaviour and the president composed himself.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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