David Gleason advised me to never write a column in the blinding heat of thermobaric rage. But he never had to endure the dying kicks of a liberation movement turned misgoverning party stripping itself, and the rule-of-law-loving people of SA, of all moral dignity and running bare-cheeked through the UN General Assembly for the world to see our complete lack of testicular fortitude.
Videos of civilians being bombed, walking dazed and bloodied through the charred, dismembered embers that remain of Ukraine’s cities, dodging bodies, with sirens and gunfire all around them, provide incontrovertible evidence that the only thing special about this Russian operation is that Vladimir Putin somehow seems to have convinced the West that sanctions will work to stop it.
To claim neutrality and then “stress that peace is best built through diplomacy and dialogue within the framework of the institutions of global dialogue, especially the UN”, while choosing not to condemn the violator of that peace, is Gordian logic of the lowest order. War is the failure of diplomacy. Special, long-term relationships endure moments of tough love.
We go begging bowl in hand to the West for gleefully accepted climate transition funds. Yet when our friends who embrace democracy and liberal values ask for help to condemn an unprovoked attack from a late-in-the-day dictator who has poisoned his enemies and opposition and amassed his wealth by extorting oligarchs, we choose to foghorn our genuflecting neutrality. It’s not a good look.
And don’t come with the Nato encroachment myth. A close reading of the historical records in both East and West shows the narrative of broken promises over eastward expansion is simply untrue. Putin’s repeated aggression validates Ukraine’s desire to be part of a broad bloc of protection.
What we may have brought upon ourselves is foreshadowed in a conversation I had with Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign and author of the best-selling Red Notice, a book about how he has hunted corrupt oligarchs to the point of being chased out of Russia.
He calls SA’s inaction a national shame. “For SA to sit on its hands and do nothing infuriates me,” says Browder. “The next time SA needs help the world will remember this.”
For SA to sit on its hands and do nothing infuriates me. The next time SA needs help the world will remember this
— Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management
He says Putin will not stop and has no reverse gear.
Browder got away with tilting at Russia’s wealthy, spectacularly corrupt elite for a while because it suited Putin’s political plan. Power had devolved to these caviar comrades when the spoils were divvied up after the fall of the iron curtain and Putin set about consolidating that power back to the Kremlin. This is also the source of Putin’s wealth, as Browder tells it.
Putin chose the biggest oligarch to bully in the playground to set an example. In October 2003 Mikhail Khodorkovsky, CEO of Yukos and Russia’s richest man, was arrested. Khodorkovsky was tried in a cage before the glare of the Russian media. When he was found guilty, most of Russia’s oligarchs went one by one to Putin and said, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, what can I do to make sure I won’t end up sitting in a cage?”
“I wasn’t there, so I’m only speculating,” says Browder, “but I imagine Putin’s response was something like this: ‘Fifty percent.’ Not 50% to the government or 50% to the presidential administration, but 50% to Vladimir Putin. It could have been 30% or 70% or some other arrangement. What I do know for sure is that after Khodorkovsky’s conviction my interests and Putin’s were no longer aligned. He had made the oligarchs his ‘bitches’, consolidated his power and, by many estimates, become the richest man in the world.”
Seized assets
Browder crusaded for the law being used to seize oligarch assets and tighten the screws on Putin. The Magnitsky Act is so named after his friend and accountant who was murdered by the Putin regime.
US President Biden launched “Task Force KleptoCapture” to confiscate Russian oligarchs’ yachts, jets and villas. European authorities have already seized some assets, such as the 280-foot Amore Vero owned by a Putin confidant. Browder says it’s still only about 10% of oligarch assets available for seizure.
Historical relationship aside, perhaps it’s the Russian oligarch model of seizing the mineral riches of the spoils of struggle that so enthrals the ANC and blinds it to the dictator in their midst. Or their entwined nationalist beliefs. But the decision does little to build trust ahead of the president’s fourth investment conference in a few weeks.
For ANC-misgoverned SA, the diplomatic die has been cast against the rule of law and peace and R1.2-trillion worth of trade with our allies in the democratic world, to side with Putin’s Russia, which, as historian Francis Fukuyama observes in the FT, “is clearly now not a state with legitimate grievances about Nato expansion but a resentful, revanchist country intent on reversing the entire post-1991 European order”.
As Winston Churchill famously said of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain: “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.”
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at badger@businesslive.co.za. His conversation with Browder is scheduled for broadcast on BDTV at 1.30pm on Monday.
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