Both countries need to find ways to repatriate their most profitable corporations that have chosen to establish fictitious domiciles in tax havens, writes André Thomashausen.
Ever since Robert F Kennedy held his Day of Affirmation speech on June 6, 1966 at the University of Cape Town, the American Dream has also been the dream of the oppressed in South Africa.
Kennedy appealed that for the essential humanity of men, the government must answer - not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion or race, but to all of its people.
His commitment was continued by the Sullivan Principles, a voluntary code of conduct for US companies in South Africa. This was followed by Europe and Japan, and became the basis for the exclusion of the apartheid state from world affairs, global trade and international finance.
America and South Africa share a painful past of racist segregation. In America, segregation erupted in civil war - the American Democrat Party fought to defend and retain the property of their African slaves.
South Africa and America had to find and defend their national identity against Eurocentric cultural domination, and both are immigrant nations.
Like America’s economy overshadows the economy of the world, South Africa’s economy overshadows Africa. America produces 21% of the world’s GDP. South Africa produces 15% of Africa’s GDP. But both have over the last two decades lost most of their consumer-goods manufacturing industries to China.
Like America, South Africa is reflecting on where its future national interest lies.
The South African Green Paper on The International Migration of June 24, 2016 records 1 061 812 asylum-seeker permits issued up to May 2015. Nobody contests that about 90% of asylum applications are fraudulent and unfounded, and a mere pretext to gain access to better opportunities.
In addition to an estimated 1000 new asylum applications a day, conservative estimates put the combined figure of legal and illegal migrants in South Africa at approximately five million, equivalent to 10% of the population, compared with 3.5% of the population of illegal immigrants in 2014 in the US.
Just as much as the US must curb illegal immigration to protect the employment and socio-economic rights of its nationals, so will South Africa have to curb the flood of people from the African continent.
South Africa and the US need economic growth, and need to find ways to create employment and uplift many from economic exclusion. Both countries need to find ways to repatriate their largest and most profitable corporations that have chosen to establish fictitious domiciles in tax havens.
The true reason why President Donald Trump withdrew the US as a signatory to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was that the TPP would have further encouraged US corporations to transfer their tax-paying and job-creating activities to lowest wage and lowest tax jurisdictions in the Far East.
Similarly the South African media never calculated the damage to the economy resulting from the largest South African corporations conducting their business in African and other foreign markets from Mauritius, as a pretended corporate domicile of convenience.
In South Africa, it is the European Partnership Agreement, and not the American African Growth and Opportunity Act that is destroying our poultry farming industry. The state bankruptcy of Mozambique last year is the result of more than 2 billion (28.8bn) in “secret” loans carrying up to 16.5% interest, arranged courtesy of French President Francois Hollande to safeguard jobs for a failed naval shipyard in his country.
Mozambique has paid with an international financial default for a dozen 38m small coastal patrol boats built in France. The US Navy would have donated the equivalent free.
For Trump, large projects in the areas where the US industry is strongest, can make a difference in employment figures. Those are power generation, power transmission, transport, construction, agro-industries and security.
In South and Southern Africa, there will be no development future as long as 70% of its Southern African Development Community population of 300 million people have no access to electricity and cannot be reached by any modern means of transport.
There are infrastructure projects that would be mutually beneficial. The key to supplying power to the SADC region is the Inga hydro power project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It could generate up to 40 gigawatts of power at near zero future operating costs. Inga needs $100bn in investment and engineering, generating and transmission line technologies best found in the US.
There are also some 20000km of rail waiting to be built, and some 20 million hectares of agricultural land in the SADC ready to be ploughed. If South Africa becomes the catalyst for such a chapter in the US-South African partnership, it will secure its future as the leading nation in Africa.
* Thomashausen is professor emeritus of international law at Unisa.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.