Roelf Meyer touched down in Washington on Thursday carrying a single immediate objective: persuade President Donald Trump to revoke the executive order that froze US assistance to South Africa and suspended normal diplomatic engagement between the two countries.
Meyer, South Africa’s newly appointed ambassador to the United States, presented his credentials to Trump earlier this year. He views the February 2025 order as the foundational barrier to restoring functional trade and diplomatic relations. Until it is lifted, he argues, it remains available as a legal instrument to justify additional punitive measures, whether tariffs, trade restrictions, or broader sanctions against South African interests.
Additional reference context is available at https://www.moneyweb.co.za/news/south-africa/roelf-meyer-to-prioritise-repairing-sa-us-ties/.
The order itself was signed by Trump in February 2025. It suspended US assistance to Pretoria, offered Afrikaners refugee status, and rested on Trump’s claims that South Africa subjects white farmers to genocide and seizes their land. The Ramaphosa government disputes those claims. Trump has also criticized South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and objected to Pretoria’s relations with Iran and Hamas.
Meyer explained his sequencing plainly. “The starting point, I think, is for us to get the executive order lifted,” he said. Persuading the Trump administration that the factual assumptions underpinning the order are wrong is, in his framing, the precondition for everything else.
His appointment itself signals a deliberate shift in Pretoria’s diplomatic approach. A white Afrikaner and veteran political negotiator now 78 years old, Meyer served as constitutional affairs minister during the apartheid era and is recognized as one of the architects of South Africa’s democratic transition, working alongside President Ramaphosa himself. He replaced Ebrahim Rasool, who was expelled from the US last year after publicly criticizing the Trump administration. The choice reflects Pretoria’s decision to deploy its most experienced negotiating capacity for what Meyer describes as one of the most difficult periods in South Africa-US relations since apartheid ended in 1994.
Beyond the White House, Meyer’s engagement strategy runs across multiple agencies simultaneously. He plans to work with the State Department, Congress, and the Office of the US Trade Representative to map Washington’s current position and identify negotiating pathways. This multi-agency approach reflects his recognition that Trump’s personal views may not align with positions held elsewhere in the US government.
Trade sits at the operational core of these interactions. The US Trade Representative recently sent South Africa’s Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition Parks Tau a detailed list of concerns covering tariffs, longstanding trade disputes, black economic empowerment (BEE) policy, land-expropriation laws, foreign policy alignment, and market access for US pork and poultry. South Africa was among 60 countries hit by new US duties last week; its exports now face 12.5% tariffs, though certain agricultural products and other commodities remain exempt.
Meyer said he received a clear mandate from Ramaphosa and several cabinet ministers to seek compromises. “It was a clear mandate to go ahead and do what we can to find solutions,” he said. One boundary, though, is firm. South Africa will not abandon its BEE policies, which address racial wealth disparities created during apartheid. “There’s no way that South Africa can walk away from that,” Meyer said. “It’s a matter of principle.”
On the specific question of empowerment requirements, Meyer pointed to South Africa’s equity equivalence framework as a possible mechanism, one that could allow multinational companies to meet empowerment obligations without relinquishing partial ownership. “We can’t make exceptions only for American companies,” he stated, framing the negotiation as a question of implementation method rather than policy retreat.
Meyer was candid about the unpredictability of dealing with Trump directly. He described his personal encounter with the president as “very friendly” but cautioned that rapport alone cannot move policy. “I don’t think it’s that easy to please President Trump,” he said. “If I was a golfer, maybe it would have been easier.”
His three weeks in Washington also revealed what he characterized as divisions within the US government itself. Some agencies, he observed, actively want to expand investment in and trade with South Africa. He was careful, however, not to treat that as a reliable counterweight. “I don’t think we can rely only on that,” he said. “The White House might come back tomorrow and say something different.”
The open question now is whether Meyer’s negotiating experience, the same experience that helped dismantle apartheid, is transferable to an administration whose decision-making remains, by his own account, difficult to predict and harder to lock down.