By Des Erasmus
South Africa is among the top global priorities for US President Donald Trump on trade and investment, with Washington seeing “beautiful music” in a deeper economic partnership if current disputes can be resolved, new American ambassador Brent Bozell III has said.
Speaking at the BizNews annual investment conference in Hermanus, near Cape Town, this week, Bozell said Trump had personally pressed him to take up the post in Pretoria and had “zeroed in on South Africa as a global partner”, driven above all by trade.
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When speaking with Trump about his ambassadorial position, Bozell said, “[H]e laid out the concerns he had, and I’m mentioning that there’s a refugee issue, the expropriation issue, all these things.
“But he kept going to trade, trade, trade, trade. To understand this … is to understand that that’s his signature. And he sees trade opportunities all over the world, and he has zeroed in on South Africa as a global partner.
“After my conversation with him – he calls very few people to ask them to do this – I was at the White House and visiting with him beforehand, I spoke with one of his deputies, and I asked him, ‘if you were to look at all the countries in the world and ask the president to prioritise them, would the President see South Africa in the top 10?’
“Immediately [the deputy] said, yes. So don’t think you’re insignificant to this president…. What he wants is partnerships. He is seeing the potential. He also understands the challenges, and they’re serious, and we’re not kidding ourselves.
“There are serious challenges, but he’s looking at the opportunities. So I say to you, ladies and gentlemen, I say this with all sincerity. This is a president who is looking at your country, and he is seeing something, he is seeing some beautiful music when we can resolve the problems that we have.”
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But Bozell also coupled his overture with warnings that US patience was running out over policy uncertainty, South Africa’s alignment with “international pariahs”, and a lack of response from Pretoria to a set of demands Washington had lodged over the past year.
He said that policies on property rights, regulatory burdens and ownership requirements were eroding investor confidence.
When legislation about expropriation, ownership and empowerment were “clouded in charges of corruption” or made compliance excessively complex, “investors get to reassess risk,” he said, and global companies could “deploy their capital elsewhere” if South Africa did not provide stability and predictability.
He said that while there was a need to address apartheid-era injustices, this had to be balanced with protecting property rights and encouraging capital flows.
“If policies create uncertainty around property rights or impose regulatory burdens that discourage expansion, the result is not empowerment, it’s stagnation,” he said.
The cost of that would fall on workers and communities, he said.
Bozell said the United States had tabled “five asks” with the South African government – including expropriation without compensation and hate speech – and had been waiting “almost a year” for a formal response.
“We’re running out of patience,” he said. “We believe that more and more it becomes a statement by the South African government when it doesn’t want to respond to simple questions that we have.
“We may not get clarity on the ‘kill the Boer’ chant that we believe is hate speech. I’m sorry, I don’t care what your courts say. It’s hate speech,” Bozell said, adding that Pretoria “has to step up to the plate” on such disputes.
He told South African business leaders to speak more openly about their concerns over policy and political rhetoric, saying he did not want to hear companies “say one thing publicly and another thing privately” about issues such as black economic empowerment.
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He linked South Africa’s foreign policy stance directly to trade and investment prospects, voicing unease over Pretoria’s “growing engagement with some of America’s greatest adversaries”, such as Iran.
He said Trump had given him a single, clear mandate for the relationship:
“He said, ‘I want South Africa to become non-aligned once again’. That’s not too much to ask… He’ll take non-alignment, not where we’re going right now,” Bozell said.
Bozell said his objective was to lower the temperature in a relationship that had been “moving to a boiling point”.
“I came here specifically with a tone that was positive, in an attempt to lower the temperature,” he said. “I didn’t come here to pick a fight… I came here hopefully to find ways that our countries can come back to the table.”
If South Africa could tackle policy uncertainty, crime, infrastructure problems and foreign policy issues while remaining at least non‑aligned, Bozell said, the economic upside for both sides was significant.
“I would love to see in five years, that we will look back to this conversation and say, what a small partnership we had then. And look where we are [now].”
