Despite raising Africans’ ire, Trump will play ball
THE PEOPLE of the US have voted Donald J Trump to the Presidency of the US for the next four years (2017-2020). What this portends for South Africa has been muddled and obfuscated by analysts who have put great store on the personal relations of the Clintons’ with Tata Nelson Mandela and Hillary Clinton’s with South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Co-operation
The apocalyptic predictions from sceptics and Hillary Clinton supporters will not occur, in the context of more powerful forces of nature. The US Presidency is a strait-jacketed function, a president might succeed with a few wishes, some off-centre, but in the main he will stay close to what he is being told to do.
The reality of the Democrats’ rule in the recent past is very far from the somewhat rosy, cosy-cosy picture painted by pundits and analysts: realpolitik and economic diplomacy were never bedfellows.
Revised agreement
First, there is talk of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) being lost in the face of a Trump/Republican victory. Selective amnesia is responsible for such thinking, because it was the Republicans under President George W Bush that conceived and passed Agoa into legislation opening the doors of the US to South Africa and Southern Africa Customs Union (Sacu).
That Lesotho now employs more than 30 000 people in the textile industry, generating $362 million (R5 billion) per annum in export revenue is an established fact. That South Africa exports cars to the US market under the revised Agoa agreement and that in turn 60 000 tons of poultry and 60 000 tons of “other meats” were rammed down the throats of Sacu is a reality we see every day in our supermarkets, in the process threatening emerging (read black) and primary agriculture.
Question is: Will the US under Trump place more onerous demands on US exports to Sacu under a new Agoa when the current agreement runs out?
Second, the Millennium Challenge Compact (MCC), a bilateral aid programme, delivered parallel to US Agency for International Development, which has delivered education, sanitation, health, agriculture and tourism projects to Namibia and Lesotho in the region of $320m each (Namibia ended 2014, Lesotho last year) for the duration of the MCC (normally five years) again came into being during the Condoleezza Rice/George W Bush era.
That Lesotho might lose the next round of the MCC from next year onwards is a function of its internal political dynamics and malady of its politics, than the lack of political willingness from the US. The irony of bilateral and multilateral aid programmes to Sacu countries is that in the region of 60 to 70 of the funds disbursed for sectoral projects in health, education, agriculture, sanitation, public works eventually ends with South African industry.
Third, there is much panic in the region, from Pretoria to Windhoek, on the future of the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar). It is striking that of the 22 countries that are beneficiaries of US largesse, 16 are African, with $6bn per annum disbursed under Pepfar.
Perhaps to a lesser extent in South Africa’s rural areas and townships where Pepfar-funded NGO’s operate, but in Swaziland and Lesotho Pepfar rules the roost among NGO’s in terms of the economic impact of NGO’s delivering for instance orphaned and vulnerable children assistance.
The more than R5bn per annum spent by Pepfar in Sacu/Southern African Development Community, primarily in South Africa manufacturers or industry, is a key component of the gross domestic product of the small countries within Sacu.
The Republican Party, which will underpin President Trump’s rule, is not going to ditch Pepfar, which has garnered so much goodwill for the US.
President-elect Trump will quickly find out that his inward looking economic posture is inconsistent with the success of his business empire. He will tread carefully.
He will also find that China, Russia and Europe control a much larger share of the global economy than the US and what he configured. There will be little room to manoeuvre. Prickly policies will be ignored by these blocs at the expense of the US. He will then have to play ball.
Trump might have raised the ire of Africans with his generally disparaging comments on South Africans and Africans in general, however, he will be advised and reined in by the Republican Party establishment in his dealings with subSaharan Africa. The imperatives of the security establishment, in terms of its dealings with the al-Shabaab and Boko Haram threat, will determine the shape and design of US economic diplomacy.
Trump will quickly find out that his inward-looking economic posture is inconsistent with the success of his… empire. He will tread carefully.