Squabble for the cameras over Africa
FOR JOURNALISTS WITH AN INTERNATIONAL MINDSET (and I count myself as one such, fairly obviously), a telling event this week was the White House visit by the President of Africa’s economically most powerful nation, South Africa. A one-to-one meeting between Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa was billed in advance by staffers on both sides as a “re-set” opportunity for relations between the two countries.
“Good Luck with that,” was most informed observers’ reaction ahead of time, And now that the meeting has come and gone … the wise adage “we will see about that” is probably the best take-away from the encounter. A genuine re-set would certainly be in order. In recent months South Africa infuriated Trump and his people with its vigorous support given to the International Court of Justice case against Israel, for brutal conduct of the war in Gaza, contentiously accusing the Jewish state of ‘genocide.’
And Trump for his part embraced baseless accusations, stirred by among others his originally South African sidekick Elon Musk, against Ramaphosa’s government for persecuting white farmers. Trump even turned around that word ‘genocide’ against South Africa’s rulers. Another performative gesture was the Administration awarding refugee status to at least one planeload so far of white South African farmers. The Oval Office exchange itself even included the screening of supposedly persuasive video material about such alleged persecution. Did it prove any of Trump’s allegations? – certainly not.
A couple of broad and simple fact-checks are needed here. "White farmers are being brutally killed, and their land is being confiscated," Trump had earlier told reporters in the Roosevelt Room. So let’s check … Whites make up about 10% of South Africa’s population, and out of the country’s annual rate of murders, only 2% or less of the victims are white. You are vastly more likely to be murdered in South Africa if you are black.
And Trump’s charge that the farmers’ land is being confiscated is spurious, too. That small population minority of whites owns between 70 and 80 percent of all the country’s commercial farmland … and though there is now on the country’s law-books a measure to allow expropriation, in some rare circumstances (and of course it comes after a nearly-four-hundred-year history of land-theft by colonizing whites) … a grand total of precisely zero land has in fact been seized.
But then, when have facts ever mattered in TrumpWorld? Well, maybe one uncomfortably undeniable fact might count for something. While Trump along with his number two, J D Vance might have publicly berated Volodymyr Zelensky and jeered that Ukraine’s leader “has no cards!! … with Ramaphosa the case is very different. Cards he most certainly does have.
South Africa in fact controls a vital part of our 21st-century global economy: minerals. It provides over 80% of the world’s platinum reserves and it ranks among the top producers of vanadium and manganese — all essential to battery technology and to modern defense systems. Mineral supply chains are now indisputably a matter of national security. And South Africa, quite literally, is sitting on the motherlode. As I say … let us see, now, just how US relations develop in the longer term with South Africa.
IT’S A KIND OF WEARY TRUISM truism that America doesn’t pay much attention to Africa in general. But it’s not always been that way. An interesting yardstick that’s barely if ever employed is which countries’ leaders any American president chooses to meet with – and it turns out to be quite revealing. Which US president has sat down with most African leaders? It turns out to have been, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Democrat John F Kennedy. But it’s far from an American political partymatter. The Republican, George W Bush is not far behind Kennedy in cultivating the continent’s top men, and (toward the end of his second term) a top woman too, Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, during his visit to her country (pictured right) … and to others too – clocking up Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Ghana. It’s hard to overestimate in how much fond regard the younger Bush is held throughout much of Africa. His founding of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known by its acronym PEPFAR, is still remembered as helping to start a reversal of the HIV/AIDS rampage through so many African countries.
Nearly two decades later, though, Africa’s biggest humanitarian crisis – indeed what the United Nations now classifies as the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, is the two-year-old civil war in Sudan. It’s been crowded out of the headlines, to nobody’s great astonishment, I dare say, by the Gaza and the Ukraine wars. America’s diplomats, though, were at one stage under orders to try their best to bring Sudan’s war to a peaceful end. During the Biden Administration, considerable energy was expended on that task by the State Department – notably with the appointment, during Biden’s final year, of a Special Envoy to Sudan, the former Virginia Congressman Tom Perriello. He didn’t have time, naturally, to achieve very much – so has he now been succeeded by a Trump appointee? No, of course he hasn’t.
On X (the former Twitter platform owned by that so-called “special government employee” for now, Mr Musk) the former envoy’s newsfeed looks rather poignant, labeled as the “Official Account of the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan, but dormant now.”
Troublingly, it could be said that the world’s press is pretty dormant too, with regard to Sudan. It's hard to tell definitively, given the sparseness of independent reporting on the ground, but there is much evidence of a ratcheting up of the war, more than any moves toward peace.
Darfur rebels, 2011. War has returned, along with famine.
New eruptions of artillery and drone-delivered explosions appear to be driving back the rebellious militia known as RSF (in full the Rapid Support Forces) from the western side of the River Nile. That was where they had retreated to, in April, from the capital city, Khartoum, which lies to the east of the massive river. We largely owe this smattering of knowledge to reporting by the Agence France-Presse agency, which has correspondents on the scene. The country’s official national army could now be gaining the upper hand, at least in this capital region.
But the picture looks very different in the Darfur region, in the country’s southwest – an area already infamous during earlier years of this century for genocidal warfare and terrible hunger, and now suffering again as the RSF launches fresh attacks. Civilians, many still living in refugee camps, are bearing the brunt of the killings, as well as the national army’s forces. A close examination by the Horn of Africa specialist, Jérôme Tubiana, who advises the charity Doctors without Borders on refugee issues, has aptly described the Darfur fighting as a “War Within a War.” The UN has accused both sides of employing hunger as a weapon of war.
So is it forlorn to look for any chances of peace? Global history is replete with examples of bigger powers stepping in to assist, or even sometimes enforce peace upon less powerful nations. The supposedly biggest power, presided over for now by the biggest blusterer, has been ‘busy’ (sort-of) with forcing peace upon Ukraine. But this week Administration sources have been muttering - usually under the cloak of anonymity - that we should now be “walking away” from the issue of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of its neighbor. Deliberately or not they are echoing the recent on-the-record statement by Vice-President Vance that it could well be time “for the United States to walk away from this process."
And again, fully on-the-record, the week began with the President’s spokesperson acknowledging from the Briefing Room podium … that the leader of the free world has “grown weary and frustrated with both sides of the conflict.” The other weaseling phrase that’s been used a lot is “Ukraine is Europe’s war” – though I’m being very unfair here, to weasels.
IT COULD ALSO OF COURSE BE SAID that the President of the United States is also ‘walking away’ from what might dismissively be called “Africa’s war” in Sudan … without in this case ever having walked anywhere near it in the first place. When I raised this with a Trump-appointed incomer at the State Department, I was told: “Frankly, with Sudan, the US doesn’t have any leverage over the warring parties.”
We must wonder if that’s really true. Sudan’s rebels, the RSF, have as crucial supporters the United Arab Emirates – even while the UAE frequently denies its involvement in the war. Both American and British intelligence services, though, have plenty of evidence proving that involvement. The weaponry and armored vehicles delivered to the RSF are being paid for in large part with gold, smuggled out of Sudan to Abu Dhabi.
Meanwhile, what deal-making has been most enthusiastically trumpeted by the Trump White House? Those agreements reached on the recent presidential visit to 3 specially-favored Gulf States. And these included a new arrangement with the UAE, which was possibly the least well-reported in detail. Trump’s ceremonial signing was photographed with the ruling Sheikh, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan standing alongside the President and giving a thumbs-up sign.
There’s much for him to be pleased about, it seems. The UAE will get — as well as a welcome supply of very advanced American military hardware — what the fine print describes as a “shared commitment to develop a structured roadmap that will guide enhanced military-to-military cooperation.” And, rather curiously, the Pentagon’s own description of all this says the UAE is being welcomed into America’s National Guard State Partnership Program; the UAE’s forces will in fact partner directly with the Texas National Guard. To quote the Pentagon again … this should achieve “integrated air and missile defense, cybersecurity … and operational planning.”
What Gulf State wouldn’t be very happy with that. And what opportunity might it possibly offer for American pressure, friendly American pressure, to be applied upon such a state … pressure that might even take real effect across the Red Sea, in the war-torn Horn of Africa. Or is that just too much to innocently hope for?