Photo: Flickr | Gage Skidmore
While Trump cited the trade deficit between the countries as the reason for the tariffs, social media users pointed fingers at the ANC and AfriForum.
The ANC was accused of destructive economic and social policies that supposedly drew Trump’s ire, while AfriForum was blamed for casting South Africa in a bad light by driving the ‘white genocide’ narrative in Washington.
READ SA agriculture sector grapples with US tariff blow
Trump’s letter, however, made no mention of domestic issues in South Africa, pointing entirely to trade instead.
“The tariffs are necessary to correct the many years of South Africa’s tariff and non-tariff policies, and trade barriers, causing these unsustainable trade deficits against the US,” the letter stated.
The letter made it clear that tariffs would only be lowered if South Africa opened “heretofore closed trading markets to the US, and [eliminated] tariff and non-tariff policies and trade barriers”.
Political analyst Dr Mpumelelo Mkhabela told Farmer’s Weekly that South Africans were inclined to overestimate the rest of the world’s interest in domestic issues.
“When the first tariffs were announced, government and interest groups flocked to the US to state their case regarding the political and social state of the country. But it is now clear that was never the issue. [The tariffs have] always been about advancing the US’s economic interests,” he said.
Trump’s ‘own agenda’
Mkhabela added that if the US were truly concerned about morality, it would not have brokered a deal with the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo to secure minerals from that country.
“Trump is advancing his own agenda. The fact that tariffs have been implemented on a range of countries – from liberal democracies to US allies and foes – shows that it has nothing to do with politics, only fixing the trade deficit. We can scrap BEE tomorrow and the tariffs will still stand,” he explained.
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Rather than perpetuate the blame game, Mkhabela said South Africa needed to unite to grow the economy instead of hoping another country would bail us out.
Commenting on the need to prioritise better trade agreements beyond the US, Jolanda Andrag, chief operating officer at Agri SA, said that across most regions, South Africa’s trade agreements were structurally poorer than those of its South American competitors.
“The US tariffs are creating a lot of noise and distracting us from the real issue. We only send 6% of our exports to the US; it should not be our main focus. We have enormous tariff challenges to overcome within the BRICS block that must be prioritised,” she said.
