Elphas Nkosi: It is now four minutes after 12 p.m. Central African time. Welcome to the Monday edition of the News Hour right here on Markus Zahaba Online Radio, my name is Elphas Nkosi. There’s an article written by Peter Bruce in the Sunday Times yesterday. We are very concerned as it appears that Pretoria is still trying to cut a disastrous deal with Donald Trump. Professor Patrick Bond, you will join us and help us unpack that story, “A glimmer of hope on trade.” Prof, thank you so much. Good afternoon.

Patrick Bond: Salam alaikum. It’s great to be back with you Elphas, thanks for having me.

Elphas: Thank you thank you very much for taking time. Let’s start with this one: the BRICS countries are now trying to mitigate Donald Trump’s tariffs. But how is it going to be done, you know, because it’s obvious to all that we’re dealing with someone who’s, I don’t know whether to say that he’s deliberately trying to disrespect other countries. But just give us a perspective on these BRICS countries trying to mitigate this.

Patrick: Well, it’s a very curious time. Today is a very important meeting online. It won’t be in person, but it will be very important with President Lula, Brazil, hosting. And there are nine other formal BRICS. There’s one extra one, Saudi Arabia. And it’s very interesting, there are another ten partners, but those 21 have very different relationships with the U.S.

And four of them are hit very hard with sanctions and that includes South Africa at 30% but also the host Lula’s country Brazil at 50% and Narendra Modi’s India 50%, and China also 30%. But that could go much higher because there are still more negotiations and Trump at one point put them up to over 100%. Now, that means four of the BRICS countries are in very bad shape with international competitiveness when they want to export to the U.S. And then there are two that aren’t really trading with the U.S.: Russia, a little bit, uranium, and Iran, virtually nothing.

And then you have the other four, which are Ethiopia, Egypt, the UAE, and Indonesia. And Saudi Arabia, which is considered among these 11 official BRICs. And those are getting only 10% tariff, which means they are really very competitive. And we don’t really have any idea why. One of the most curious ways in which Donald Trump has indicated his displeasure with the BRICS was a threat to impose a 10% tariff on everyone extra. So it would be 20% for those four. But then he’s basically pulled back on that because of his basically erratic approach.

So the two crucial ones, India, which got an extra 25% tariff on most of its goods supplied to the U.S. – and that’s because of their supply or their importing of oil and gas from Russia – and then for Lula, the 50% is due to prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, who is Trump’s favorite politician in Latin America. Now, that means you’ve got Iran and Russia sort of not really in the playing field. You’ve got a big split within the BRICS: some, probably, are happy to be divided and conquered and be the favorites of Trump, especially the Middle East countries. And then some are getting very, very furious, especially Modi and Lula.

And now we’re going to see if today’s meeting does come up with a collective response. And that’s very important because South Africa does have a lot of zero percent tariff exports. Basically, our big platinum metals group, our gold, our manganese and titanium, some of the other minerals. But the big ones – which are steel and aluminium – got a 50% tariff back in February, and automobiles which got 25%: those are really being hammered. The new data that just came out showed a 67% crash in some of those heavy industrial exports to the US in the second quarter. It really hit. And it would be hitting even harder now with the 30% coming in for exports, especially of citrus, of macadamia nuts, of grapes and wine, and then any other exports to the U.S. that aren’t covered in what I’ve already said.

What an incredibly complex, messy situation where Cyril Ramaphosa thought with his charm and sophistication he could get a better deal, but he hasn’t. And now it’s, as you say, it looks like some gossip in the U.S. that maybe they’re going to look at South Africa again, but they don’t like Ramaphosa. And maybe they’re going to look at another, let’s say, trade ambassador from South Africa going there this week, named Alistair Ruiters.

Elphas: Yeah. And, you know, just touching base again on that article by Peter Bruce, is that a dreamer of hope, though, with regards to what is currently happening and trying to meet some sort of deal?

Patrick: There is, let’s just say, not just South Africa, but the hope would be a collective response that would increase the pressure from at least these four BRICS countries that are tariffed hard. Those being, again, Brazil, the host today in the online meeting, and India at 50%, and then you have South Africa and China. And so those four countries really have an interest in saying, ‘Let’s have a collective BRICS response. Let’s put sanctions on the U.S. Let’s figure out where, for example, the U.S. needs platinum.’ South Africa’s got 85% of the world’s platinum. Maybe, as Gwede Mantashe even said, back in February, we should have a platinum embargo. Add Russia, add Zimbabwe. You’ve got basically 100% of the new platinum. There’s obviously recycling, as well, that the US and Canada are doing.

But that would be a very interesting way, wouldn’t it, along with the Chinese rare earth minerals ban that got Trump to chicken out, ‘TACO’ as they call it, and retract his most extreme sanctions against China. So you could do something collective, but I don’t think there’s the will, I don’t think there’s the hunger to attack Trump collectively. Because they fear the US in all sorts of ways that the US can be, and Trump particularly, vindictive. So that means one by one, and we’re seeing it with Alistair Ruiters, the investment special advisor to President Ramaphosa, formerly the director general of the Department of Trade and Industry, and also one of the Samancor directors during a very turbulent period where Samancor and some Kazakhstan company officials and warlords there were looting Samancor.

Alistair Ruiters has seen it all. I knew him quite well in the 90s and wrote some white papers when he was the DG at trade and industry under Alec Erwin. I have a lot of respect for him. He has a PhD from Oxford, which he did on cooperatives. But we’ll have to see whether he’s the right guy, since Mcebisi Jonas wasn’t even given the entry permit to the U.S. because of what he had said about Trump, being a racist and a narcissist. But also because, I think, the MTN controversy in the U.S. Because MTN, the big phone company, which Mcebesi Jonas chairs, is in the U.S. courts, partly because of a Turkcell Iran-related bribery allegation, and also because of the use of the Taliban’s access in Afghanistan. At the point where U.S. troops there were being killed, the allegation is that MTN collaborated with the Taliban when they were in this war against the United States occupiers. Now, those are the sorts of things that, maybe, Mcebisi Jonas breathes a sigh of relief. He doesn’t have to go to the U.S. – he isn’t being allowed to go. Maybe Alistair Ruiters, who is a very suave diplomatic man with an impressive background, probably a lot of good contacts, he’s now trying to patch things up. I doubt he’ll succeed. Things are too crazy.

And you saw that also last Friday when Donald Trump confirmed he wasn’t coming to Sandton for the BRICS summit on November 22^nd-23^rd. He also confirmed he’s going to use his own Miami Doral Country Club as his host site for the G20 in 2026. So that’s something that raises everyone’s eyebrows because it’s simple personal profiteering, from his role as president. Not unusual in this case, of course.

Elphas: When you look at all of these events, and all the happenings, should we perhaps maybe say that we see some sort of changes in geopolitics?

Patrick: Yes, I see three big ideologies in the power center that represents a change. Before Trump there was a single unifying approach, let’s call it a neoconservative plus neoliberal fusion. By that, I mean during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama period. And then of course that led up to Trump winning. It was so unsuccessful for ordinary workers, they voted out that pair: George W. Bush, who was a neoconservative, Barack Obama a neoliberal, but both of them basically supporting corporate America. But George W. Bush being more aggressive, militarily, and Barack Obama being very aggressive as a neoliberal, with the World Trade Organization. You remember he came to South Africa and forced these dreadful chlorinated U.S. chicken parts on South Africans. So that was using his AGOA, Africa Growth and Opportunity Act privilege and power.

Now that AGOA deal is dead, this month. It won’t be revived, it’s fair to predict. And I think the main thing that we learned from that period was that if you had the right wing of the Republican Party in George W. Bush and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in Barack Obama and African Americans, or to be elected president. It didn’t really matter from the standpoint of imperialism. It worked through neoliberal and neoconservative operations, through vehicles like the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, all of these institutions, especially the UN Security Council. So what’s new is the third ideology of this power bloc, which is paleoconservative, which I see as being a reflection of the far right, neo-Nazi, proto-fascistic conservatism of the U.S., the nativism, the isolationism, the racism, the misogyny, the islamophobia, the transphobia, the homophobia, all the attributes of that defensive white male working class.

Now, I happen to have grown up in a place, Alabama, where that ideology has been thick on the ground. And so you can imagine the extent to which that racist, revanchist, revenge-oriented sort of desperation of the white male worker and the petty bourgeoisie in the white community suffering under this period of the 21st century of too much globalization that undermines their position. They’re losing their competitiveness and they’re losing their direct incomes. And so they vote Trump in hoping to make America great again. That ideology is terribly dangerous because it’s not, as advertised, against US military intervention abroad. We saw Trump bomb Iran in the most brutal, unprovoked way. And so it’s that sort of, let’s say, mix of the right-wing agenda, plus the military-industrial complex, and the other new thing is the techno-feudalism. That is, the lords of Big Data especially Elon Musk until he fell out with Trump, but all those guys – Mark Zuckerberg with his Meta, Jeff Bezos with his Amazon and Sam Altman with his artificial intelligence company, OpenAI.

These are the guys that I think are profiting the most from Trump giving them huge tax cuts, but also letting them go wild, especially the Johannesburg-raised Peter Thiel, who’s the sponsor of J.D. Vance, who will probably come to Sandton in November as vice president. And Peter Thiel has a company called Palantir, and they’re spying on us all the time and they’re taking all the data they can and this is I think what ultimately will be the long-term manifestation of Trump’s presidency: cyber currency, artificial intelligence, everything going wild, no regulation allowed, as part of his new Big Beautiful Bill. And this is the most dangerous part of these ideologies that are now emerging, as paleo-conservative, plus the techno-feudal – that is, the feudalistic control of our lives, our ideas, our mind, our data through some of the big companies. It’s not just here. It’s also in China with Alibaba and Tencent. But I think in the West and South Africa gets victimized, of course, by Western big data. We will be under their thumb unless we find a way to fight back.

Elphas: Yeah. And I will look at other conditions by Donald Trump. Let’s look at Pretoria. Do you believe that there’s a possibility to fully cut diplomatic ties with Israel?

Patrick: You know, that was what we saw in the Sunday Times with the rumor from Peter Bruce. And I respect Peter Bruce as the organic intellectual of capital. In other words, what business sort of wants and desires and dreams and can’t say out loud, Peter Bruce will usually say. He’s very eloquent. He used to be the Business Day and Financial Mail editor and publisher. He’s an extraordinary writer, and every week or so you get some new ideas. His idea, as you put it in that Sunday Times column yesterday, is that now Ramaphosa must really try to appease Trump. And the best way is to reopen the embassy in Tel Aviv.

Now what’s happened with that embassy, and let’s not forget there’s also an embassy in Ramallah, but if you look at the website you see an incredible difference in what the South African government provides its citizens. In Ramallah, which isn’t yet a country, but South Africa would recognize it as a Palestinian state, hopefully with East Jerusalem as the capital one day, but basically, the Ramallah embassy is useless. It’s still open, but it doesn’t do much. But the Israeli embassy, that is South Africa’s embassy in Israel, was very very rich with information and events and activities and support for especially the South African citizens that would hang out in Israel, even joining the Israel Defense Forces.

Now, that role then has faded away because of the genocide and South Africa’s taking Israel to the International Court of Justice. However, don’t forget that in November 2023, Parliament’s only real statement – as a unifying statement, because the Economic Freedom Fighters asked it to do so – was finally a statement about the genocide saying ‘break diplomatic relations!’.

Well, Ramaphosa and first Naledi Pandor, his foreign minister, and next her replacement, Ronald Lamola, have just ignored that. And so it’s a constant beat from the Palestinian solidarity movement to cut the ties and officially close that embassy, withdraw any diplomatic relationships and kick out any last bits of that Israeli embassy in Pretoria, and the Israeli trade mission in Johannesburg. So that’s the demand. And what Peter Bruce is saying, no, no, they’re going the opposite direction, if Trump is able to persuade Ramaphosa that part of doing a trade deal would be to reestablish diplomatic relations. That would be such a defeat for internationalist support for Palestine, given that stage of the genocide, the mass starvation, and now the mass wreckage and invasion of Gaza by the Israelis. So let’s hope Peter Bruce is just fantasizing, and that he doesn’t have a leg to stand on, but you never know. He’s got his contacts inside government, and he’s confident enough to write that down.

Elphas: And then coming back to the BRICS, we hardly share perhaps maybe about what they are all about. What strategic role are they playing or could play? I’m saying this because, you know, I think one needs to read up a little bit about BRICS countries. But as it stands, is there perhaps maybe a specific strategic role that the BRICS countries will play?

Patrick: Well, they could play a very important role and the biggest role that they’ve been talking about since 2013 when in Durban they had the BRICS Summit, was to get new financial institutions and global financial reform. But I must tell you, I’ve studied this very carefully. I’ve edited several books and written hundreds of articles. It really isn’t happening. And I’d love BRICS New Development Bank to have a new way of doing things, to lend in local currencies, to respect local environmental and social conditions.

But you just see what they’re doing now with their latest loan, which is to SANRAL. And they’re putting a big toll road through the Wild Coast and the Eastern Cape and they’re completely ignoring problems. This is a 7 billion rand loan. To its credit, the Bank realizes that if you’re building a road in South Africa, you don’t need to import very much, maybe a bit of the construction equipment. But basically you really need to get your local labor, your local materials. You lay out the tarmac and put a road, after you clear the brush. You get the road in. And that doesn’t take any foreign exchange. They are making this loan in Rand, not in dollars. That’s unusual. Only 23% of the BRICS New Development Bank loans have been in local currencies. To me, that’s shocking. It means that this is still a bank that’s rooted in the dollar. And likewise, there was a Contingent Reserve Arrangement that’s meant to be an alternative to the IMF. And they haven’t got up and running.

And so the IMF comes in and makes loans like the one in 2020 to Tito Mboweni, the finance minister at the time, for COVID. And that has given us all the current austerity conditions. I think I’d add that if you look at some of the projects that the New Development Bank has done in South Africa, most of them, I’ve written a long article on this, I can say have the touch – or the stench – of corruption and that would include the SANRAL loan.

And there is opposition from the Amadiba Crisis Committee on the coastline, where they’ve been fighting against titanium mining, and they’ve been fighting against offshore oil and gas. And they’ve been very successful. In about a week, they’ll be in the Constitutional Court defending their case which they won against Shell and Johnny Copelyn, the famous oil man who’s an eNCA owner, and Southern Sun hotel and casino owner. And they defeated Johnny Copelyn and Shell in the High Court in Makhanda in 2022, and then last year in the Supreme Court. This is a very exciting time to ask, is this Amadiba Crisis Committee movement, which is opposed not only to mining and to offshore drilling, but oil and gas during a climate crisis: are they also going to be strong enough to fight back against this big toll road of SANRAL? Well, the BRICS New Development Bank didn’t consult them, and they don’t seem to care. So at that level, of what BRICS could do, I’m not seeing anything in any way really different except that one bit of local currency lending.

And then you go to the reform of international finance. And that, again, has been very disappointing. One of the ex-ministers who has been sent over to Washington is our representative there, but they really don’t do anything different. They sit as directors. They’ve got 1% of the vote. And they don’t change the way the IMF or the World Bank do anything. And that would go for the big countries from BRICS, China, Brazil, India, Russia, who have, by the way, invested more and more in the IMF. And they advocate investing more in the IMF, even though that means it comes at the expense of poorer countries, the small and poor countries, which lose their voting share.

Now, those are just a few of my complaints about the way the BRICS do business as a collective. They haven’t changed anything. They’re just a new, I’m going to use the word, sub-imperial ally of the imperial Western financial system. And that’s why when they even threatened to talk about a de-dollarization, and then they’re told they shouldn’t, they stopped. Last October at his Kazan BRICS Summit, even Vladimir Putin said, no, we don’t want to de-dollarize. We’re not trying to replace the dollar. So they’re very frightened of that.

Those are the things that should be happening, right? Because the U.S. dollar is so central and the Federal Reserve has too much power and prints too much money on one day and then raises the interest rates too much the next day. But I just don’t see the BRICS, in the current configuration, where the ruling classes are generally dictatorial or, in our case, neoliberal and reactionary. I don’t see them doing anything that is, you know, different. I hope I’m wrong. And I hope today I will be proved wrong, and that they do come up with a collective response to Trump and tariffs, but I fear they’re too divided.

Elphas: Absolutely, Prof, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. It’s a very big thank you there to our guest, Professor Patrick Bond, who is a professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg.

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