Pretoria has achieved the near impossible: getting US Democrats and Republicans to agree on something.
The Democratic Party, with President Joe Biden as its standard bearer, and the Grand Old Party, as the Republican Party is referred to, seldom agree on anything, and their bitter disagreements have made for good television in recent years.
But if there is one thing they do agree on it is their dislike of Russian goliath Vladimir Putin. That is if you exclude former president Donald Trump, who seemingly worships the ground Putin walks on. For Trump there is something alluring about despots — in his world what the US needs to make it “great again” is for him to rule until the end of time.
News that the Democrats and Republicans are coming together to pile pressure on Biden to move the hosting of the African Growth & Opportunity Act (Agoa) forum away from SA is therefore an ominous sign.
Agoa unilaterally provides duty-free access to the US to most African countries, and SA is the biggest beneficiary, having dispatched $3bn worth of goods to the US in 2022.
Now four senior US legislators, Chris Coons, James Risch, Gregory Meeks and Michael Thomas McCaul, have essentially asked the Biden administration to start the process of excluding SA from Agoa on the basis of allegations that Pretoria has helped arm the Kremlin in its unjustified and deadly invasion of Ukraine.
Coons and Meeks are Democrats, while McCaul and Risch are on the red side of the isle. Politico describes Coons as an unofficial White House envoy in the Senate. He has Biden’s ear. They come from the same state, Delaware, and you know what they say about homeboys.
Despite President Cyril Ramaphosa’s best efforts to present SA as nonaligned in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the international community is not buying it.
The next few months will therefore be a watershed for SA’s economy, and it may well be Ramaphosa’s legacy that he got us kicked out of Agoa. As if he has not done enough damage to the moribund economy already.
It was always going to be tricky trying to maintain a relationship with despots while heading a constitutional democracy. Now the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost.
Legend has it that the seeds of what would later become Brics were planted by Russian strongman Putin in 2006 on the margins of a UN meeting. A year before that Putin had told his countrymen of the deep-seated pain he felt at the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin said in a 2005 state of the nation address. “As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory. The epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself.”
Putin has since worked hard to restore his beloved Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was of course part. But the majority of Ukraine’s people have tasted freedom and don’t want to relinquish it for the sake of a long-gone empire.
Putin has been left to bomb his way into trying to hold on to a dying dream. Thousands of innocent people have died in his dangerous quest to rewrite a history of which he is a prisoner.
This presents SA with a problem. How can we not align with truth, justice and what is morally sound? We have chosen to sit on the fence, all in an attempt to appease a despot. And now our battered economy is paying a heavy price.
Ramaphosa has a lot to think about on the plane during his imminent trip to Russia, where he is leading a delegation ostensibly to mediate in the Russia-Ukraine war, and to ask Putin not to attend the upcoming Brics summit, which is pencilled in for August in Johannesburg.
The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest for allegedly overseeing the abduction of Ukrainian children. Yes, child abduction. That is what we are sitting on the fence about.
Ramaphosa’s request has no moral basis. Our laws are clear: if Putin comes, we have to arrest him or run the risk of sparking a constitutional crisis and being seen through the eyes of the world as a lawless state that chooses to be nonaligned in an unjust war.
It will be a hard sell this to Putin. He has no appreciation of an independent judiciary or laws that are not intended primarily to protect a head of state. The very thought that Ramaphosa or any president in the Brics bloc will kowtow to the rule of law is a foreign concept to Putin.
Democracy in its fullness is a terrifying thought to the man. He detests what he sees in post-Cold War Ukraine, a thriving democracy where a comedian could be elected head of state. How could they turn Ukraine into a circus, Putin must be asking himself.
It seems it is not the claimed Nato expansion that keeps Putin up at night, but rather the spread of democracy in Eastern Europe. Democracy and freedom delay his lifelong quest to re-establish the Soviet empire.
The deepening of Pretoria’s relationships with some of the world’s worst authoritarian regimes is not only morally wrong, it is strategically unwise. Fortunately, it is not yet too late to change course.
• Khumalo is Business Day companies and markets editor.
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