Following the announcement by US President Donald Trump on April 2 that South Africa would be subjected to 30% tariffs on its exports to the US, banker and academic Colin Coleman has said there is little hope of this being a short-term intervention.

He said it was likely that Trump’s policies and approach would extend beyond his four-year term into the next administration, which in all likelihood would also be Republican.

“I do strongly believe that this may not be a short-term phenomenon. If you are planning on this being a four-year thing [and you want to] just put the hatchet down and forget about it for four years, and then revisit, you might actually find in four years’ time that it's another four years and then another four years, because there are some fundamental shifts in [US] society.

“This is not a personality issue [surrounding Trump]. This is about the whole society embracing a certain direction,” he explained to delegates attending the 2025 PGMs Industry Day, in Johannesburg, on April 3.

He cautioned the audience not to dismiss Trump and his ideology as a fringe phenomenon, noting that he represents the people of the US, which has the strongest economy in the world.

“He is someone that, you have to bear in mind, leads a $30-trillion economy, accounting for 25% of the world's GDP. One must take this into account,” Coleman said.

He said April 2 was “a day of reckoning” for South Africans, because a few parallel issues with major consequences occurred nearly simultaneously.

He explained that one was the "Day of Liberation" in the US, with Trump’s new tariff regime being announced, in which South Africa will, going forward, have 30% tariffs on most of its exports to the US, bar some exempted products such as platinum group metals.

This means that about 8% of all South African exports now have a 30% tariff increase applied to them, which Coleman said ultimately rendered the African Growth and Opportunities Act obsolete unless parties managed to negotiate a different outcome.

Simultaneously, the South African Budget factors are leading to a situation in which the Government of National Unity is on very thin ground.

“It was a day of reckoning for us as South Africans, because it's got vast implications for not only our political economy, but for our economy and for the mining industry,” he said.

Coleman said that, if one wanted to understand the implications of these measures, one could bet on an outcome and would have to probability-weight outcomes. One’s case for planning a business has to somehow read the risk-weighted probabilities of outcomes.

“We have to humble ourselves to the fact that we are a small economy, even though we are a large, sophisticated financial market punching above our weight. The biggest positive one can say about South Africa's economy is that the market capitalisation of the JSE is two-and-a-half times the GDP, which is the highest market cap to GDP ratio of any country in the world.

“That’s why South Africa is loved so much, and why investors can trade in and out of South African stocks – because the liquidity and tradability of our financial markets is so good, and the rand is a very good proxy for emerging markets and very liquid,” Coleman said.

Southern Palladium executive chairperson Roger Baxter said there was cause for concern, because the South African economy was quickly running out of growth engines, and those growth engines going forward were not going to be the US or China, and they're not going to be India, because India is just too small still.

“We are looking at a profound hit to the global economy, but we're also looking at a profound geostrategic power shift taking place, where effectively, the US has gone from being the leader of the Western world as a market development economy and having led the liberalisation of markets over the last several decades – in fact, in the post-Second World War period – to a country which has now turned protectionist and is focusing on its own issues. It's effectively inserted a geostrategic wedge with its major trading partners,” he noted.

Baxter said South Africa strategically needed to weigh up what the critical relationships that the country needed to sustain were, but that it was important to do so in a way where the country could keep its openness while somehow focusing on improving competitiveness as a country.

“In my view, that's going to be the game changer for South Africa. We really need to focus on getting ourselves a lot more competitive, reduce red tape and get the private sector more involved in key industries to unlock them,” he said.

“It's no longer about growth. It's about survival. It's about creating internal resilience and finding ways to survive this. And then, from that standpoint, you will find opportunities,” Eunomix CEO Claude de Baissac added.