For the tens of thousands of South Africans whose livelihoods depend on selling cars, fruit and minerals to the United States, the question hanging over Pretoria is no longer whether trade ties with Washington will change, but how painful that change will be. President Cyril Ramaphosa has begun preparing the country for the worst, telling an African National Congress gathering that South Africa may not be included when the African Growth and Opportunity Act comes up for renewal in 2028.
“We remain part of AGOA,” Ramaphosa said, noting that Congress had decided South Africa should stay in the program, while the executive branch remains the open question. “We are not the first and only country to be taken out of AGOA. And I believe we will not be the last.” He urged calm, telling his audience not to “go out and jump off tall buildings and think that this is the end of the world,” while conceding that exclusion would be “devastating for us, the number of jobs involved.”
The stakes are concrete. Tens of thousands of jobs in the auto, agriculture and mining sectors are tied to trade with the United States, and in a country where youth unemployment stands at 47 percent, the loss of preferential access would land hardest on young workers. AGOA, once a free-trade agreement granting duty-free entry into the American market, now carries the Liberation Day tariffs introduced under President Donald Trump, though Congress and Trump renewed the program until December 31, 2028. Negotiations are underway in Washington over who will be included in the next round, and the prevailing expectation is that South Africa will not be on the list.
Ramaphosa’s answer, so far, has been to look elsewhere. He pointed to the tariff-free access China has granted African countries, calling it “a great achievement” and “a great boon” that allows South African goods to penetrate what he described as the biggest market in the world. He and the Deputy President have been traveling to open up alternative markets. The numbers tell part of that story: according to figures cited by the state broadcaster SABC, trade between Beijing and Pretoria reached nearly 15 billion US dollars from May to August this year alone, and Chinese Ambassador Wu Peng says the zero-tariff arrangement has encouraged a shift beyond traditional mineral resources toward value-added products such as machinery, chemicals and electronics.
Not everyone is convinced the pivot to Beijing solves the underlying problem. Geraud Neema, the China-Global South Project’s Africa editor, noted that Chinese customs data show South Africa’s exports to China remain dominated by gold, chromium and titanium, raw materials that value-added growth has not yet offset. “As much as you can see the growth of certain products, they’re not growing enough to offset that,” he said, adding that he had expected Wu Peng to acknowledge the discrepancy between the two countries’ trade statistics.
Ronak Gopaldas, a director at the geopolitical risk consultancy Signal Risk and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, framed the moment as one about leverage. The Trump administration, he said, weaponizes trade and tariffs to extract concessions elsewhere. While the business community has largely prepared for the loss of AGOA and financial markets are unlikely to react sharply, “obviously, it’s a devastating impact in terms of jobs,” he said, particularly in an economy that is already struggling.
Gopaldas described Ramaphosa’s position as a delicate diplomatic tightrope: alienating a key economic partner would not end well, yet the president cannot concede on certain red lines without losing face at home. Behind the political friction, he noted, the economic relationship has quietly continued, with the DFC taking stakes in critical mineral investments, including the Phalaborwa Rare Earth Project. South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Rolf Meyer, has struggled to find openings, telling of trade proposals met with rejection and no clear explanation of what Washington actually wanted.
For Gopaldas, the broader lesson for African policymakers is to know what leverage they hold, whether in critical minerals, geography or demographics, and to diversify their partners rather than depend on any single power. “You’ll get partnerships, but you won’t get charity,” he said, pointing to regional integration and domestic industrial capacity as the harder, longer work that tariffs and trade deals alone cannot replace.