THAMI MAZWAI: Playing to the gallery will get SA nowhere in dealing with US

It is distressing to watch people angrily wag their forefingers at US President Donald Trump, telling him of SA’s right to self-determination. While they are clearly correct, the bottom line is that we need the US more than it needs us. 

Let us escape the hallucination that we can keep boxing above our weight class. The fact is that while the World Bank classifies us as a middle-income country, our peers have far better socioeconomic and quality-of-life profiles. It is embarrassing to boast that we are punching above our weight when the majority of South Africans are trapped in poverty. 

In 2020 City Press reported that about 2.1-million children live in households where there is not enough food, while adults in destitute families take turns eating to ensure the children have something. Matters have not improved in the ensuring five years.

Millions of South Africans, black and white, have been stripped of dignity by the levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality in the country. More than 26-million people now receive social grants every month and about 9-million unemployed receive the social relief of distress (SRD) grant of R370 a month.

Earlier this year Stats SA specified that about 3.7-million households faced moderate to severe food insecurity in 2023, while 1.5-million endured severe hunger. This was reinforced in the president’s 2024 state of nation address, which confirmed that 55% of the population — close to 35-million people — survive on incomes below the upper-bound poverty line of R1,634 per individual a month.

Our church has a feeding scheme every Saturday and when families come for a meal, often their only decent meal for the week, the misery in many households is clear. Other churches and organisations also have feeding schemes, which says a lot. 

It is therefore not surprising that President Cyril Ramaphosa and his team, cognisant of the gravity of the above numbers and other issues afflicting SA, warned against those who were set on giving Ebrahim Rasool a hero’s welcome when he returned from the US. Sadly, he was ignored.

I sincerely hope sanity will prevail regarding the president’s other warning, on the bid to rename Sandton Drive after a Palestinian woman the majority of South Africans have never heard of. The point is that Sandton Drive cannot be named after an unknown when the price we will pay is yet more hunger.

It costs Trump nothing to keep turning the screws on SA — we do not even feature on his radar otherwise. It is especially galling that the Sandton Drive renaming proposal came from the Al Jama-ah party, which got a mere 1% of the Johannesburg vote in the 2021 municipal election.

When it comes to SA taking the alleged genocide in Palestine to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), my heart tells me it was the correct thing to do, but my head is asking whether enough thought was put into the price we may pay.

I also do not understand why the Arab states, which are always so passionate in UN debates on the Palestinian issue, did not take the matter to the ICJ. African states, including Zambia, Lesotho and Zimbabwe, paid with the lives of their citizens when they supported fellow Africans in their fight to be free from apartheid rule. 

The price SA pays for poking the US bear keeps rising. Last week the US imposed further tariffs that have now hit our automotive sector. Already 15,000 people have lost their jobs because Trump discontinued funding for projects battling Aids and other diseases. South Africans are going to lose their lives if their treatment ends. 

Heaven help us if we go ahead with the Sandton Drive renaming. Fortunately, executive mayor Dada Morero appears to be alive to the implications, and this name change may not see the light of day. Unlike those who flocked to welcome Rasool, he is listening to his president.   

There are times when emotional intelligence demands that regardless of the fact that you are within your rights, it is prudent to keep your head down. That Trump is insulting our national integrity is without doubt, but we simply cannot afford empty slogans that do not take into account our socioeconomic reality.   

Playing to the gallery will not get us anywhere. Let us stop being that family that buys the most expensive fridge to provoke envy among their neighbours. If the fridge is empty because the monthly income is going on instalments that family will starve.

• Dr Mazwai, a former PAC activist, journalist and editor, chairs enterprise and supplier development company Mtiya Dynamics.