GLOBAL MARKETS
TONY LEON: Trump may have no clothes, but SA is naked in the investment winter
Personable, affable Ramaphosa offers intangibles in a country that desperately needs to lure the sceptical dollar
Two weeks ago in Cape Town, a few days before Donald Trump blew up the meeting of the US’s closest allies at the Group of Seven (G-7) meeting in Canada, I had the privilege of introducing a very different type of American at a packed meeting of the South African Institute of International Affairs. UK Prime Minister Theresa May once disparaged "citizens of the world" as "citizens of nowhere" but that moniker is worn with pride by South African-born journalist Roger Cohen and peppers his lustrous columns in the New York Times. Cohen chose for his topic What Trump Means for SA and the World. However, he began his speech with a title inversion and generously remarked: "I am tempted to dwell more on what SA today means to the US…. That a nation, a liberal democracy, one with more fragile institutions than ours, of more recent creation, can survive a corrupt, vulgar, pretty relentless kleptocracy and come through intact with a new leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, who seems to promise a new beginn...
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