It was a hard, dirty job for Ramaphosa dialoguing with Trump, but someone had to do it

About a decade ago we had a peculiar term introduced into our lexicon — "state capture".

It dominated the headlines for many years with many fingers pointing at former president Jacob Zuma and the Gupta brothers, who are allegedly being sought to come back to face the music. 

Since the beginning of this year, the term has sprung up with many warnings for American citizens about President Donald Trump and his controversial side-kick billionaire Elon Musk allegedly unleashing their own grander version of state capture.

According to Wikipedia, state capture is "a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state's decision-making processes to their own advantage". And, by the look and the smell of what they've been up to in the last couple of months, it seems Trump and the Pretoria-born tycoon are taking state capture to exospheric levels, or beyond. 

With this week's US "working visit" by President Cyril Ramaphosa and his unusual entourage to revive trade relations, some questions arise.

With all that he has said on record in the past - and some of it under oath - on this subject, did Ramaphosa remember to manage conflicts of interests, avoid grand corruption, collusion and "capture" temptations?

Or are those of us raising the question and sounding the alarms simply being ungrateful and alarmist?

Trump did try to manage the dazzling and egregious conflict of interests playing out at the White House meeting on Wednesday where Starlink received some valuable, "free" airtime and brownie points while Musk looked on. His satellite internet service was promoted for use in SA to fight farm crime. I’d give Trump 1/100 for effort.

Trump can no longer ignore the growing complaints about such conflicts of interests that smack of state capture.

Interestingly, the same Wiki also states that "State capture is not necessarily illegal, depending on determination by the captured state itself ..."

Anyway, it was a hard, potentially dangerous and dirty job that Ramaphosa and Co had to do in Washington to save our small, open and potentially vulnerable economy. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn't go to curry favour with those two ruthless musketeers currently running the USA like their tuckshop. But it was painful watching and listening to some of the cringeworthy false claims, exaggerations and plain blue lies.