SA carries US on its tiny shoulders

DEAR SIR — Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies (pictured) has given readers an excellent summary of benefits to both the US and Africa in general, and SA in particular (Renewal of Agoa a benefit to both US and Africa, August 13).

Your newspaper also reported $14bn worth of company investments into Africa, all emanating from the developed US as a global superpower (Summit takes US to African centre stage, August 11).

As a proud South African, it gives me great pleasure to remind all that SA is the giant at the forefront of stimulating growth in the US. SA is reindustrialising the US!

A single former apartheid South African company is doing all of the above by finalising its commitment to invest up to $21bn into the “developed” US. This giant South African petrochemical investment into the US will reindustrialise the US, make the US less dependent on fuel imports, make it less vulnerable to competitive dollar depreciation, and make the politically strong US even stronger.

Thus, when it comes to trade and industry relations between small SA and the US superpower, we may be proudly South African and not be too humble: a single South African company invests more into the US economy, strategic industry, fuel independence and associated sovereign power, than a lot of US companies combined do in SA.

Thus, the South African investment into the US, via the previously state-owned Sasol (40% of shares are still owned by the Industrial Development Corporation, the Public Investment Corporation and the Government Employees Pension Fund) is gigantic relative to those of the US companies alluded to in the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) saga.

I thus predict that Agoa will be extended, SA included, because SA, via Sasol, is actually the Goliath in the industrial redevelopment and 4% economic growth rate of the US, where unemployment is low.