The unintended consequences of Ramaphosa's US visit
The South African delegation led by President Cyril Ramaphosa with the US delegation and President Donald Trump at the White House
Image: GCIS
INADVERTENTLY, President Cyril Ramaphosa and his team's visit to the White House achieved what they never set out as their goal in the first place: Confirming before the international media that South Africa is suffering from ubiquitous crime.
South Africa's detractors have often described our country as the crime capital of the world. And, in their mission to reset frosty bilateral ties with Washington, Ramaphosa and his team members took time, one after the other, painting a picture of a crime-riddled society that is simply too much of a high risk to invest.
Team South Africa was vociferously attempting to debunk the AfriForum-led fat lie of genocide against the Afrikaner community, especially farmers. But in that turbo-charged performance, the President and his team unfortunately ended up shooting themselves in the foot, drawing a picture of pervasive crime for which they asked their host, President Donald Trump, for technological assistance to curb it.
Violence and crime against the Afrikaner community were always going to be high on the agenda during Ramaphosa's meeting with his unpredictable US counterpart this week. Ramaphosa was armed with credible players in his team to dispel the Afrikaner genocide myth. However, the sudden accentuation of South Africa's crime epidemic in general was the work of Ramaphosa's undoing.
In attempting to counter the false narrative of Afrikaner farmers' genocide, our President voluntarily revealed that South Africa's crime was not discriminatory in nature. We all have a fair share of it, he and his team argued without any force or coercion.
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Afrikaner billionaire Johann Rupert, a member of the Ramaphosa delegation and a close friend of Trump, added two very crucial but equally self-harming details about crime in South Africa. The Cape Flats in the Western Cape, which is under the governance of Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen's DA party, experience the bulk of their crime from gang warfare.
Secondly, according to the highly esteemed Rupert, the wine farmlands experience most of the crime from the marauding illegal foreigners.
Now, what this means is that the illegal foreigners are untraceable. Unless caught in the act, there is no way to investigate their whereabouts. They have no fingerprints in the country's home affairs database, no source of knowing who they are, their age, gender, how long they've been in the country, what else they do for a living other than steal, kill and maim their victims, and so forth.
Rupert's assertion is unfortunately true. But additionally, in front of the president and a few of his cabinet ministers, Rupert was telling the White House and international community at large that South Africa's borders are porous, and the immigration system accordingly is in a shambles.
The border patrol authorities are not winning against illegal fence-jumpers (others go under the fence, or simply through it), and the picture Rupert painted was of a chaotic free-for-all.
Trump has recently sent packing dozens of Venezuelan gang members, declaring them undesirable aliens in the US. Rupert painted a picture of the Western Cape that is infested with gang wars that constantly claim innocent lives and have turned life into hell for the multitudes.
Ramaphosa was determined to strike a trade deal that involved all sorts of assistance, including in crime-fighting technology. But even the most ordinary US police officer listening to the South African team's presentation would shake in their boots and rather resign from the force than be deployed to South Africa. And yet that was not the end of the story!
One of the professional golfers in Ramaphosa's team, Retief Goosen, told Trump and his people about the hellish life his family endures in Polokwane, Limpopo. His elderly mother lives in constant fear of being attacked and raped. His brother struggles with the safeguarding of the family business, which involves part-time farming. 'My family lives behind a high electric fence,' the man affectionately known in the golfing circles as 'The Goose' told Trump.
For a moment, I was wondering for which team Goosen was playing for — Trump or Ramaphosa?
Then 'the Big Ease', Ernie Els, a golfer friend of Trump, also painted a picture of a South Africa riddled by an indiscriminate wave of crime. All these performances, mark you, come in an effort to dispel the false narrative that the Afrikaner farmers are exclusively targeted in a reign of terror, or genocide, as the White House believes.
We are trying to build a country together, but there are some who are working against transformation. The objectives for an inclusive society are noble, but crime is a nightmare, to paraphrase Else.
Even Cosatu's President Zingiswa Losi added her labour spice to the overarching albeit unintended theme of crime in the televised exchanges between Washington and Pretoria. South Africa needs the US companies to invest, but the US needs to assist South Africa in the efforts to push back against the runaway crime; otherwise, the environment would not be conducive for US investment, she reasoned.
Now, in light of the overall performance of Ramaphosa's team, we need to be worried. We must be very worried. Sometime ago, the sitting Minister of Police, Bheki Cele, confirmed that some police stations around the country were under the 24-hour protection of the ADT, or other private security companies. Initially, I had dismissed such claims as sheer baloney or downright racist. It wasn't until Cele confirmed the claims that I was left with a jaw down.
On the day that Ramaphosa and Team were inadvertently shooting themselves in the foot, something in support of their scary presentation to the White House was happening in Kleinvlei in the Western Cape. The Kleinvlei police station was attacked.
Luckily, or thankfully, no one was hurt. With AfriForum in our midst, I do not doubt that the news has already reached Elon Musk and the White House. A few months ago, another police station was attacked in the Eastern Cape at night, and guns were stolen.
Granted, President Ramaphosa and Co were strenuously trying to show that crime is not an exclusive preserve for the Afrikaner minority. We all have our share of it, and hardly ever refer to it as 'genocide'.
This unfortunate message of a South Africa under the throes of criminality went out globally from the horse's mouth. Every foreign investor in our economy must be evaluating their options. As for potential investors, they must have thought coming from the lips of the country's head of state, his ministers, South Africa's wealthiest man in Rupert and a couple of professional golfers who are not into politics, South Africa must surely be a hell of an unsafe destination to do business.
Even the Agriculture Minister in the team, John Steenhuisen, acceded to a battle with crime but as always, never lost the opportunity to have a go at EFF's Julius Malema and the MK Party, a cooperation between the two of which in the eyes of Steenhuisen constitute a 'Doomsday Coalition'. The DA leader told Trump: 'We joined the GNU to keep this lot out!'
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