SA joins global nail-biting over US elections while Agoa uncertainties persist

4 Nov 2024

US presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have taken vastly different stances on Africa, with much of SA, but not all, likely to be rooting for Harris.

Like the rest of the world, South Africa will be closely watching Tuesday’s US presidential elections with huge interest – and not a little anxiety.

The polls are still showing former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris running neck and neck, making the likely impact of the elections on the world still a toss-up.

For a country like Ukraine, the outcome could be existential as Kyiv and its allies have real fears that if Trump wins, he might cut off military aid to Ukraine and pressure it into an unfavourable peace deal with his apparent friend, Vladimir Putin. America’s Nato partners are also watching the outcome anxiously as Trump has threatened to pull the US out of the now 32-nation alliance – ostensibly for not paying its dues.

Beijing is also watching the election with some apprehension. Most observers believe it would prefer a Harris presidency as Trump has threatened massive increases in tariffs on Chinese imports.

But Patrick Gaspard, US ambassador to South Africa from 2013 to 2017, and now head of the Centre for American Progress, told Ann Bernstein, director of SA’s Centre for Development and Enterprise in a webinar last week that he believed China would actually prefer a Trump presidency as it would weaken the Nato alliance, which has declared both Russia and China as its rivals.

Read more: America’s fate, foreboding and infamy fill the atmosphere before a divided nation picks a president

Uncertainties for SA

In South Africa, Trump has some fans – including the likes of AfriForum, which in 2018 lobbied him to Tweet about the “large-scale killing of farmers” and the SA government “seizing land from white farmers”.

But it’s probably a sure bet that most of SA and Africa are rooting for the Democratic Party candidate Harris. No one on this side of the Atlantic has forgotten that the last time Trump was in the White House, he described African nations as “shithole countries”. Many also recall that in his memoirs of his time as Trump’s defence secretary, Mark Esper wrote that Trump once told him that the US should shut down all its embassies in Africa.

That obvious contempt for this continent would probably mean a President Trump Mark 2 would at best put little energy into relations with Africa and South Africa even if he doesn’t actively downgrade relations.

By contrast, President Harris would sustain and probably amplify the effort President Joe Biden has devoted to improving relations with Africa. In 2022, he unveiled a sub-Saharan African strategy and hosted the first summit of African leaders in eight years, following former President Barack Obama’s first one in 2014.

Biden has also promised to visit Africa for the first time as president and still plans to travel to Angola, though that will now only happen, if at all, in the truly lame duck period in December.

Big uncertainties for SA and Africa about the next US administration include the fate of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) and the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), according to Africa watchers close to the Harris campaign.

Read more: Trade Minister Tau confident US will renew SA’s Agoa membership

Pepfar has so far pumped more than $8-billion into saving the lives of those with HIV/Aids in SA since 2003. US officials point out that both these programmes depend more on the outcomes of Tuesday’s congressional elections than the presidential poll, as both are controlled by Congress. And to date, they have both enjoyed strong bipartisan support in Congress.

But both are founded on legislation which needs to be renewed soon and there are signs that the enthusiasm to do so is flagging. For SA, the prospects are even less certain because the ANC government’s chumminess with Putin and its sustained perceived hostility to Israel have provoked conservative, mostly Republican, legislators to call for a review of SA’s continued participation. Losing Agoa duty-free access to the lucrative US market would cost SA much in exports, especially of motor vehicles and also wines and fruits.

Read more: Agoa, agoing, agoner? Uncertainty dogs US trade policy for Africa — here are the risks

Hope in Harris, albeit slight

SA and Africa need a White House and an executive branch to continue to play their key role in driving these laws. The Biden administration has been particularly critical in defending SA against congressional efforts to eject it from Agoa. It seems doubtful that Trump would bother.

Africanists close to the Harris campaign note that though Biden has not done all for the continent they had hoped for, he has devoted considerable time, energy, diplomacy and political capital to the continent.

The large US investment in the Lobito Corridor, which is upgrading the railway line linking the Angolan port of that name to the mines of Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia and possibly beyond, has become the flagship project of Biden’s Africa policy. Its geostrategic aim is to give the US a bigger stake in critical minerals which China has so far largely monopolised.

Harris would doubtless pursue a similar Africa policy and likely expand it. She demonstrated her interest in the continent by becoming the highest-ranking Biden administration official to visit, touring Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia in March 2023. According to African Intelligence, Bintou Njie, Harris’s special adviser for African affairs, has organised a group of African experts to devise an African policy for her if she wins this week.

This policy would build on Biden’s legacy, including the Lobito Corridor, but with a new, sharper focus on good governance, women’s empowerment and digital inclusion, all of which Harris emphasised on her African tour.

One of her advisers told Daily Maverick that Harris would host another summit with African leaders and would put these summits on a regular footing, probably three-yearly, as other African partners, like China, the European Union and France do. He noted that the US, even under the Democrats, had been struggling to maintain a consistent high-priority Africa policy.

“It was sort of knocked off the agenda by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and then the Israel-Gaza conflict,” said Harris’s adviser.

“I think we can get it up to being a consistent top-tier issue – if we can have another summit, if we can really build out the Lobito Corridor, if we can mobilise new investment, if we can develop instruments to help companies reduce the risk of investment. If we can really identify key sectors, critical minerals, digital finance that US companies can engage in, I think that would go a long way.”

He said one important extra boost for US investment that a Harris presidency could well provide would be to take the Section 30D incentives for US companies to invest in critical minerals from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and put them in Agoa. This would greatly expand the incentives for Africa as they now apply only to countries with which the US has free trade agreements, which in Africa is only Morocco.

Read more: Kamala Harris & the world — where does the presidential candidate stand on foreign policy?

Trump’s views on investment

It seems highly unlikely that Trump as president would host an African leaders’ summit though it is possible that being business-friendly, he would support the government providing incentives to US businesses to invest in potentially profitable ventures in Africa.

J Peter Pham, a former US special envoy for the Sahel and the Great Lakes during Trump’s presidency, told The Africa Report last week that although Trump’s remarks about “shithole countries” might linger in memory, his first-term Africa policy was better represented by the creation of the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

The DFC greatly increased the government’s ability to catalyse private sector investment abroad through various government financing options. Pham suggested that for too long, America’s relationship with Africa had stressed aid rather than investment.

A Harris adviser also credited Trump for the DFC, noting that Prosper Africa – which coordinates 17 US agencies to more efficiently help Africa – was also created under Trump. It was also under Trump that the US began negotiations with Kenya for a free trade agreement which under the Biden administration was diluted to a “rather vague” Strategic Trade and Investment Partnership aimed at other goals like boosting investment and supporting regional integration, not liberalising trade.

Temper optimism

Both sides of the House now seem to be prioritising investment. In that sense, the outcome on Tuesday will not necessarily make a radical difference for Africa – and even if Harris wins, much more still needs to be done.

Bob Wekesa, director of the African Centre for the Study of the United States at Wits University, wrote in a recent article for Kenya’s Nation newspaper that US policy to Africa has changed very little over the years, whether a Democrat or a Republican was in the White House.

So “those expecting a change in US-Africa relations with the election of either Trump or Harris would better temper their optimism with doses of this reality”.

He noted, for instance, that neither Trump nor Harris had mentioned Africa in their campaigns, suggesting its low priority.

He nonetheless listed some significant likely differences. For instance, he believes if Trump wins he would punish African (and other) countries for dealing with China. And indeed, Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for a Trump presidency drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation, has said that the US should “eliminate funding to any partner that engages with Chinese entities directly or indirectly”.

Wekesa also discerned another important difference, writing that a Trump president would pressure Ukraine to cede occupied territory to Russia and abandon its intention of joining Nato in order to end the war. This would in turn lower food and commodity prices which had peaked because of the war, hitting Africa particularly hard. DM

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Business Maverick

Uncertainties for SA

Hope in Harris, albeit slight

Trump’s views on investment

Temper optimism