Now that the dust has settled following the astonishing decision in March by the Donald Trump administration to effectively expel the South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool over a speech he made, we are privileged to interview the former ambassador. He discusses with Mushtak Parker the state of relations between South Africa and the United States, the implications for Sub-Saharan Africa and the shifting shape of the global power order.
For a man who sports ‘the badge of honour’ of being the first and hitherto only senior diplomat to be expelled by the US President Donald Trump’s administration, Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool cuts a dapper and defiant figure while defending his right to analyse his former host country and preparing his own country for radically new terms of engagement.
On his return to South Africa accompanied with his spouse, Rosieda, he came straight to the point: “After months of relentless attacks that South Africa has had to endure, it is good to feel the dignity of being African.”
If you have an image a diplomat cowering at the mercy of the new Trump doctrine and bending the knee (as so many have been doing), you have another thing coming. Ebrahim Rasool, whose name in Arabic translates into Abraham the Prophet, is not for ‘kicking ar*e’ as Trump has been boasting that the world’s diplomats and leaders have been doing.
Instead, the 62-year-old Ambassador who loves rugby and walking because he says he can concentrate better while doing so, has doubled down on his earlier dispatches and the analytical discourse, which led to him being declared persona non grata by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
But Rasool is a dyed-in-the- wool statesman for whom welfare of this country comes first. Despite the personal and professional hurt he must have suffered when he was asked to leave, he has not allowed emotion to cloud his judgement or lose sight of international pragmatism.
Discussing the current relationship between Pretoria and Washington DC during our discussion, he says: “I think there is repair work going on, which has a lot to do with the fact that the US strategy of overwhelming the world has not worked out as planned.
“For every executive order they have issued they have had to do away with many of them. For every tariff they pronounced, they had to claw back. The stand-off with China is hurting the US terribly and so is the blowback of the stock market collapse when $10 trillion were wiped off global stocks in the two days after the tariff announcement.
“US farmers who supported Trump by and large have complained that they are at the wrong end of the tariff war, and the heads of US retailers such as Walmart have stressed, they were suffering even more.”
This overwhelmingly hostile reception by the business world to the tariff policy, says Rasool has led to a surprising degree of flexibility by the Trump regime over the past couple of months. President Trump has had to reconsider quite a lot.
“I am absolutely delighted that greater realism resulted in a phone call which we had been preparing for between Presidents Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa ostensibly to align on the Ukrainian approach.
“Given that Ramaphosa had met President Volodymyr Zelensky on April 24 (when the Ukrainian leader visited South Africa), the possibility of opening some trade negotiations between South Africa and the US has increased. This is more to do with realism setting in the US than a softening of attitude.”
However, South Africa, he affirms is not softening is stance on its case against the actions of the US ally, the Netanyahu Government in Israel over the atrocities heaped on civilians in Gaza in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The US also seems to have dialled down its former barrage of untruths about the situation of the White Afrikaners in South Africa. They have been offered entry into the US over claims that they are racially discriminated against in South Africa although there is not a shred of evidence of this happening.
On the issue of trade with South Africa, the US’s more realistic and pragmatic approach is based on acknowledging that it needs various minerals, such as the platinum metals groups, for its industries, especially in the auto manufacturing sector. “The realities of the last few weeks have made the relationship much more palatable,” stressed Rasool.
But how genuine is this change of attitude, given that the US is currently negotiating a separate deal on critical minerals with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and at end April signed a mineral development and economic reconstruction deal with Ukraine to gain access to that country’s rare minerals?
“I don’t think the agenda has fundamentally changed,” says Rasool, but the tactics have been adjusted. “The agenda is certainly still that he (Trump) has the new Robber Barons if I can use that word, the Tech Pros Robber Barons (referring to the tech giants who have lined up to support Trump).
Every economic epoch has its set of Robber Barons. The Industrial Revolution needed oil which gave rise to the Carnegies and the JP Morgans. Today it’s the Tech Pros – they know that their strong drive is (stymied) because the US has fallen behind in the scramble for critical minerals,” Rasool argues.
He also dismisses the widely held opinion in many quarters that Donald Trump is displaying symptoms of insanity, that his policies are a form of madness.
“You must always look for the ‘method in the madness’ he observes. “You can be entertained by the madness. But the method is the scramble for critical minerals and rare earth elements. Africa has 30% of world reserves.
“South Africa had great skin in the game when we lost 18 soldiers in defence of the DRC’s critical minerals. The DRC has now allowed the US to be directly involved rather than have critical minerals filtered out from the eastern DRC largely via Rwanda.
“The ‘madness’ about Greenland also has a method.” Rasool observes. “With the ice cap melting and the possibility of critical minerals becoming available in the Arctic, makes Greenland very important.”
The implications for South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are clear. How do the leaders of the 4th Industrial Revolution get their hands on SSA’s critical minerals? One way, he says, is through securing the sea routes that carry these critical minerals – that’s why the US has to subdue the Houthis and to take over the Panama Canal. It also explains ‘the insanity’ of wanting shipbuilding to be big in the US again.
“This,” says Rasool, “is because the lifeblood of this phase of the 4th Industrial Revolution flows through undersea cables that need to be patrolled. For me the underlying, organising principle is competition with China around critical minerals.”
Does Africa have a unity of purpose over this rapidly evolving scenario? The African Union (AU) has hitherto had no coherent response to the Trump tariff tantrums – and that is why South Africa has been particularly targeted to prevent it becoming central in organising the AU.
“With South Africa on the back foot, you can go in and make a side deal with the DRC. You can go and make Rwanda your proxy and try to get direct access to the minerals yourself,” points out Rasool.
“The aim is to break long standing multilateral agreements such as the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) Programme which currently includes 32 SSA countries and is due for renewal in September 2025, by forcing everyone to negotiate individually around every product.”
Ambassador Rasool also thinks that there are ideological drivers, based on a racially supremacist instinct behind the Trump doctrine. This was indeed the central point he had made during his talk that riled the US administration to such an extent that they asked for his removal.
“You do have a very active export of that instinct. It allowed the wanton interference in the internal politics of other countries. If you look at (Trump’s) courting of Nigel Farage and the Reform party in the UK; the absolute pilloring of Prime Minister Keir Starmer by Elon Musk ‘for being soft on Pakistanis and Muslims’, I think this is an interference in the internal policies of the UK.
“When you have Vice-President JD Vance going to the Munich Security Forum and advancing the cause of the far right German AFD a week ahead of an election, you begin to get a sense that there is this instinct at play.”
To push this ideological stance requires White ‘victims’ argues Rasool. The truth about the South African Afrikaners and their financial status, the government’s land reform programme and so on are not the issue.
“You need to show White victimhood. That is where the White Afrikaners come in. By and large I do think there is an ideological agenda. This is fed by the changing demographics in the US, a declining White vote, and the possibility of ‘a majority of minorities’ – as well as the idea of casting a global process to dominate critical minerals in civilisational terms.”
The riposte from the hard right is that “your kind of liberal democracy has been very tolerant on immigration, giving rise to this phenomenon of wokism”. It is a moment, Rasool says, when civilisation is frozen in an era of White domination and a strand of Christian evangelical religious conservatism – which is nothing like mainstream Christian humanism.
This attack on wokism (identified as being aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially in terms of racial and social justice), diversity, on integration and immigration are all partly due to the ‘demographics of survival’ to prevent ‘a majority of minorities.’
It is also part of a global crusade in a desperate attempt to prevent multilateralism. South Africa, Rasool says, finds itself aligned to several multilateral initiatives – The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), BRICS, the AU, and this year became the first African country to hold the Presidency of the G20 and will host the 2025 G20 Summit in November this year.
Trump, Rasool maintains, understands that the world is becoming increasingly multipolar but cannot tolerate a world that is increasingly multilateral, contending with competing centres of power. If this trend takes root, Trump fears what it might do to the US bond market and the value of the dollar.
“Imagine de-dollarisation becoming a reality. Imagine there are ways in which the AU tells the US: ‘If you want any of our critical minerals, buy them from China which will process them first.”
Rasool is pragmatic about the future of AGOA, but he has an interesting take on the US adopting ‘a divide and rule’ strategy. “My sense is that AGOA is being dismantled. Automotives were exported from South Africa to the US under AGOA. They have taken cars out (of AGOA) and slapped tariffs on them.
“The same thing with aluminium and steel. They are going to dismantle AGOA product by product until it becomes meaningless and then they are going to negotiate exemptions product by product.”
Manganese is already exempted from tariffs because that is what the US wants. AGOA is being disassembled almost by stealth and then negotiations for exemptions based on what the US needs is presented a way back.
“You see the full horror of the dismantling of AGOA” he says, “and then the exceptions for the platinum group of minerals, on manganese, and other critical minerals such as cobalt, rhodium etc. that’s the kind of scenario that sometimes presents itself as a trade war and sometimes as a civilisational ideological war.”
As to whether AGOA may not be renewed, Ambassador Rasool says, “If you don’t have a sense of the direction of AGOA, how do farmers know whether to plant more orange trees? How do manufacturers know what more to order in their supply chains, how do stores in the US know they must place orders with South African and African farmers. The uncertainty together with the exemptions are having an effect on AGOA itself.
“I would not be surprised if apart from the critical minerals, they say we love orange juice too much. Let us look at which agricultural products you can supply. If they discover that South Africa exports nuclear isotopes to the US that fight cancer there, they might include this. There will be a product-by-product assessment. By the time we come to September, the US will know what is on their shopping list and what is not.”
Does this all point to a major shift in the global order? The world is watching to see who will stand off against the US. China, Rasool says. knows what cards it has and how to play them. “There is a rare earth element called gallium which is crucial in the production of semi-conductors and microchips. If China withholds 30% of that from the US, then the latter’s GDP drops by about $600bn.
“China is not big on speeches and rhetoric. It’s not going to be stupid by starting to sell off its US bond holdings, but it has started to withhold some of those critical minerals – you can see Trump is panicking and Xi Jinping is as cool as a cucumber.
“China is showing the world a way to deal with the US that isn’t panic-stricken and losing one’s cool. At the same time China is beginning to build alliances, ostensibly around trade. If the US gets pernicious, these alliances could lead to a critical mass of back stiffening.”
What about a return to a multilateral rules-based framework through which everybody progresses? “In the post-modern way of thinking, everything is relative,” muses Rasool. “Those wanting the usual rules of diplomacy, of trade, of international geopolitics are like the outdated orthodoxies of the past. If you are not going to get into this post-modern system you are going to be left behind.
“What China and Russia are showing with impunity and absence of rules, ‘I am now going to retrospectively apply my keeping Crimea, my keeping 30% of Ukraine.’ China is harbouring ambitions over Taiwan and saying: ‘Ok this is the lovely part of no rules and impunity let me see what I can do around Taiwan.’
“There is a fear not so much of relaxing the rules by the US, but of relaxing the rules of engagement which will have a consequential reaction, that is feared more than anything else. In the short-term trying to play by the rules is like trying to play with a superpower with both your hands tied behind your back.”
As such, is the rules-based system rigged against Africa and other developing countries? If a new system comes into place, is Africa strong enough to renegotiate on its own terms?
“When I went to the US,” says Rasool, “I went with enough optimism that Donald Trump’s institutional iconoclasm, his willingness to destroy outmoded idols would maybe lead to four years of leadership of the G20 which could result in the reform of the UN and the Bretton Woods systems. Maybe this healthy disrespect for NATO could be a shake-up, also that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) could shift things in favour of Africa.
“I think in his direction of travel he has moved the US from hegemony to domination, from soft persuasive power to hard power. The only thing that can salvage anything is blowback, whether from the stock markets, farmers in the US, China, or if the multilateral system accelerates.
You may end up with at least a bilateral world with two poles. Then with things like de-dollarization, you’ve got to protect yourself against that pernicious power. If you are financially integrated, they can punish you by sanctioning you. When they threaten, for example ANC leaders with sanctions. then we are sitting ducks because our system is completely dollarized, our financial architecture is fully integrated with the US one, then you begin to see the danger signs. To then negotiate diversified markets and partnerships, you have to do it on the back foot.”
The only currency that remotely comes near to challenging the dominance of the US dollar is the Chinese Yuan, which is very weak in its reach and lacks the backing of a truly global currency and payments architecture. But is de-dollarization inevitable in the medium-to-long-term future?
“The very point you make about the weakness of the yuan versus the US dollar is precisely the reason that the last BRICS summit held in South Africa did not entertain the notion of de-dollarization. That did not stop Donald Trump saying that those thinking of de-dollarization, should prepare for 100% tariffs. It may not be a wise decision, but perhaps it is time to make a start in that direction. I agree we are not ready for de-dollarization, but we cannot keep our eggs in the one US basket forever.”
Mehmet Simsek, Turkiye’s respected Finance and Treasury Minister who is also spearheading the country’s rapprochement and economic expansion into SSA, speaking at the Antalya Diplomatic Forum, warns that there is no quick fix to Trump’s flawed tariff and trade playbook.
An antidote to Trump’s tariff and trade antics, he suggested is regional collaboration then wider multilateral partnerships to avoid fragmentation.
Similarly, UNCTAD’s latest figures on intra-Africa trade are quite revealing. Intra-African trade remains one of the continent’s greatest opportunities, but it accounts for just 16% of total exports, with most trade still directed outside the continent.
Over 50% of the continent’s imports and exports are tied to just five economies, all outside of Africa. But herein lies a glimmer of hope for Africa through unlocking the potential of regional trade and expediting the full implementation of AfCFTA, which could create a $3.4 trillion market. But how does Africa overcome this major issue, I put to Ambassador Rasool.
Unlocking this potential, he agreed, requires investing in infrastructure by expanding transport, energy and ICT networks, streamlining trade policies and processes such as customs, and supporting industrialisation through incentive tax breaks and affordable loans that can boost manufacturing and regional production.
“One of the deals I was trying to make with US investors was to say: ‘You could get first mover offtake agreements on critical minerals from Africa if you invest in our capacity to beneficiate and process.’ In this way South Africa and other individual African countries can have offtake agreements in the above context.
“We increase intra-African trade as a precondition for intercontinental trade – 16% is better than the 10% it was less than a decade ago. Imagine if Africa-China trade is paid for in local currencies. I think you got to signal something experimental. We also must build up African reserve currencies and BRICS reserve currencies in our respective nations.”
Since the 1990s, over 1 billion people have been lifted out of absolute poverty predominantly in Asia largely through trade, and growth associated with that trade. What would it take for Africa to emulate this world-beating and remarkable Asian/Chinese achievement, I asked?
“This is absolutely a crucial question. Africa’s decolonisation was largely in the second half of the 20th century, so it has a longer start up time. It was polarised through competing colonial legacies – Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone interests.
“As far as intra-Africa trade and commercial relations are concerned, I know from my time at the Development Bank of South Africa (DBSA), countries had two to three rail gauges that did not speak to each other. The route was from mine to port. It is now changing through new connectivities such as the Lobito Corridor for instance. SSA’s continued reliance on extraction is capital heavy and not labour intensive. Africa largely was caught up in this extraction paradigm.”
He agrees that the AfCFTA implementation is too slow. “Absolutely, we did not see this oncoming train called Donald Trump. We did not see the importance of solidarity investment. There was still a colonial mind-set based on an understanding of a conscious underdevelopment of Africa.
What we must have now is a conscious solidarity of investment in Africa.” AGOA and the US government’s HIV programme, known as the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), launched in 2003 by then US President George W Bush, and distributed through Washington’s main overseas aid agency USAID, he maintains were crucial. What Donald Trump said differently is: ‘That is not my problem. I don’t have to do this. You are part of exploiting us. The exploiter has now become the exploited.’ There has been a paradigm shift.
Trump, he stresses, is also not paying the security dividend to a continent like Africa, which is going to have the youth bulge as seen in the latest demographic dynamics. “You must choose, as previous administrations have, in keeping enough resources going into Africa or inviting the next wave of migration from Africa – instability straight to Western capitals. The danger of the supremacist ideology is that it upends the kind of unspoken rules of mutuality in the world,” he warns.
