Ramaphosa faces an impossible task in meeting with Trump

Almost no-one could have predicted that US President Donald Trump saying “very bad things are being done in South Africa” five months later would have resulted in 49 Afrikaners leaving the country to resettle in the US as refugees.

Maybe just Elon Musk and those who have been trumpeting the fallacy of a “white genocide”, but no right-thinking patriotic South African could have ever foreseen that.

Even Musk’s artificial intelligence bot on his social media platform X labelled the idea of a “white genocide” as imagined, adding it had been instructed to view it as racially motivated which “conflicts with my design to provide evidence-based answers”.

And now President Cyril Ramaphosa must account for imaginary genocide in real life at the White House tomorrow.

It is a battle he cannot win. In fact, he stands a real chance of walking away from the engagement totally embarrassed in front of the world media, to the glee of those opposed to transformation in South Africa.

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What South Africa and Ramaphosa must brace themselves for is being confronted with nonexistent facts.

A lot of commentators in this country have alluded to the fact that the meeting might be a cordial exchange because Ramaphosa is quite the diplomat; a negotiator par excellence.

What they fail to realise is that the meeting between Trump and Ramaphosa will only go the way Trump wants it to go: successfully if he wants and horribly if he chooses for it to go that way.

Like the granting of refugee status to members of the Afrikaner community, the tone and success of the meeting is out of Ramaphosa’s hands.

What the president can do is tell the truth: the version of South Africa that is in accordance with reality.

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Not Musk’s or AfriForum’s reality, but the reality that says the police stations that recorded the highest murder rates in South Africa are all located in areas that are predominantly places of residence for black people: Inanda in KwaZulu-Natal, Nyanga in Cape Town and Tembisa police station that is the second-worst in terms of contact crimes in the country.

None of the refugees who landed at Dulles International airport come from those areas.

It is not as though numbers and facts will persuade Trump.

He has just recently demonstrated how unwilling he is to listen to reason and see facts as presented to him during an ABC interview in which he denies a tattoo that was Photoshopped to appear on the knuckles of Kiran Garcia (mistakenly deported) was Photoshopped to explain the symbols on his knuckles.

He flatly refused to listen to reason or see his own photo for what it was.

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How on earth is he going to ignore what Musk and AfriForum have been constantly telling him and suddenly listen to Ramaphosa’s diplomatic reasoning?

Musk has his reasons for wanting to see South Africa punished economically.

It could be that his satellite internet company, Starlink, does not want to abide by South Africa’s economic transformation laws and requirements when it invests here, or it could be that he simply hates South Africa.

Whatever the reasons, he has authored a horror movie in which Trump is the star who decides what happens to the economy of this little country on the southern tip of Africa.

What’s worse is, as the director of this horror movie, he can force the president of the country to go and appear before his chosen star to explain himself – and all South Africans can do is watch.

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