South Africa seeks ‘meaningful deal’ with US amid strained ties
South Africa wants to reach a broad-ranging agreement with the US on diplomacy and trade amid strained ties between the two nations, President Cyril Ramaphosa said.
A dispute over Pretoria’s land and foreign policies has put it firmly in US President Donald Trump’s crosshairs, with Washington halting almost all aid and the secretaries of state and finance skipping Group of 20 meetings in South Africa.
“We don’t want to go and explain ourselves,” Ramaphosa said at Goldman Sachs event Thursday. “We want to go and do a meaningful deal with the United States on a whole range of issues, and the signals that we’re getting are that we need to enable the development of that process to happen — it’s inevitable that we will get together and do a deal.”
Trump’s decision to freeze aid to South Africa because of its new land-expropriation laws and “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies” — including accusing Israel of genocide in the International Court of Justice — has led to a R7.5-billion ($407-million) shortfall for its longstanding HIV programmes.
“It’s an interconnected world — we’ve got to deal with each other, whether we like it or not, and we’ve got to look at other policy positions that we may differ on,” Ramaphosa said.
Trump claimed on his Truth Social account on February 2 that South Africa is confiscating land. The nation’s authorities haven’t confiscated any private land since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Trump “got the wrong end of the stick” on the country’s land policies, Ramaphosa said. “We had decided that it’s not best to have a knee-jerk reaction to all this. We wanted to let the dust settle.”
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