For investors, the spectacle of President Cyril Ramaphosa's fraught Oval Office encounter with US counterpart Donald Trump was little more than a sideshow.
The true test for Africa's most industrialised nation, they said, will be whether its coalition government can survive long enough to bolster lacklustre growth and contain debt.
When Trump confronted Ramaphosa on Wednesday with false claims of white genocide and land seizures during a face-to-face meeting at the White House that was broadcast live, back home South African politicians were finally uniting behind a budget.
Though it took three attempts, agreement on the spending bill puts to bed, at least for the moment, a tug-of-war that earlier this year threatened to destroy the fragile political union and sent the rand toward record lows and bond yields spiking.
The drawn-out budget saga was a painful episode for the government of national unity GNU, its first significant attempt at a governing coalition in the country's 30-year history as a multiracial democracy.