US tariffs, Agoa threats limit Ramaphosa’s options

For the continent and South Africa, the stakes are very high.

- MUSTAK PARKER

When future generations look back at this moment in anger, at the once-in-a-century “US unilateral declaration of trade, economic and financial independence” from the rest of the world on April 1, will they be as conflicted as the harried, fractured President Donald Trump, or will their opprobrium also be directed at the rest of the world leaders who, perforce, will be sending their precious parliamentary attempts at disrupting the old world order by precipitating a pernicious trade and tariff war in which there will be no winners?

They have the most invested in this unfolding debacle entirely not of their making, for their generations will have lost the corrective, right of righting the wrongs of the highly flawed Trump Doctrine of Governance. “Droit babies Droit”, which seemingly empowers his salvating cabinet and unelected Doge separatists with scant regard for democratic niceties, due process, and the rule of law in their pursuit of “financial liberation” at any cost and putting America first. With order in disorganised chaos, even more pronounced than in his first term.

He has doubled down in his disruptive policy madness threatening to annex neighbours such as Canada and Mexico, retaliate against punitive tariffs on most of the world’s economies including Russia, North and Belarus, in addition to targeting South Africa over its land reforms to the cheers of his far-right acolytes watching with acidic, a coterie of conflicted white Afrikaners, feeling marginalised as a precarious geriatrification.

With some $6.5bn stripped off US, European and global stocks in the two days after his declaration, Trump and his cabal of MAGA (Make America Great Again) manic ideologues, have dismissed any opportunity to fix the financial markets’ divorce worth paying and an opportunity to make money, promising economic nirvana down the line.