Ramaphosa’s invitation to Trump

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the nation invited his US counterpart to send officials to the country to “explore opportunities for deepening investment and trade.”

It extended the invitation to a “government and business delegation,” he said in his weekly letter published Monday. 

The US is South Africa’s largest trading partner after China, and more than 600 American companies do business in Africa’s most industrialised economy. 

Ramaphosa and President Donald Trump spoke directly in Washington last week after his public dressing down over what the US leader falsely claimed was a genocide against White farmers, and set out his case for a reset of relations between their two nations.  

This came after Ramaphosa went to the White House looking to persuade Trump to stop floating the conspiracy theory that there’s a genocide against White people in South Africa.

It was “definitely an ambush, because the program format was changed at the last minute,” South African Presidency spokesman Vincent Magwenya said in an interview after the meeting.

“You could see, standing inside the Oval Office, that this was a well-planned, well-orchestrated operation.”

“That video and those articles had no credibility whatsoever,” he added. “But from here onwards, we can now deal with substantive issues, because they’ve made the point, they will feel good they’ve made the point, and we can now focus on what needs to be done to take the relationship forward.”