[Letter] ANC policies impede SA-US trade

SA’s trade negotiators are doing their job, but the real issue is not trade; it’s politics (“Our negotiators misread the room”, August 4). 

Donald Trump’s tariff war highlights a deeper impasse: US demands for liberal economic reforms clash with the ANC-led government’s commitment to the national democratic revolution.

The main obstacle is the ANC’s political will, not the tariff standoff. The US tariffs on SA imports are used as a political coercive tool, meant to pressure the ANC to classify farm attacks as a priority crime, repudiate the “Kill the Boer” chant, abandon expropriation without compensation, and exempt US firms from BEE requirements.

Trump’s “America First” agenda is by no means intended to promote global liberalism, rather the opposite. It is a neo-mercantilist approach aimed at advancing national economic power through state-led economic measures such as tariffs.

However, the ANC’s illiberal policies threaten US economic, strategic and regional interests, in the US’s assessment justifying the coercive use of economic tools to push SA towards investor-friendly policies.

Issues of rural safety, insecure property rights and racial quotas are, in Washington’s view, nontariff barriers. Trade negotiators are hamstrung, when the real obstacles sit in Luthuli House and not necessarily in the department of trade, industry & competition.

As long as the ANC remains obstinate in its ideological stance a favourable trade deal will not be made and punitive tariffs will remain. 

Letter originally appeared here.