Is there any intellect of consequence left in our diplomacy?
This matters because SA will live or die by its ability to trade freely with the rest of the world, and you do that with skill and discretion. And second, because we have one of the largest diplomatic corps in the world, and it might all be a complete waste of money.
Take the past few days. The UN General Assembly voted on a resolution reaffirming its warm ties to the Council of Europe, a redoubtable institution born out of World War 2 to protect and preserve human rights in Europe.
The motion was 10 pages long, but included this paragraph near the top: “ … Recognising also that the unprecedented challenges now facing Europe after the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine, and against Georgia before that, and the cessation of the membership of the Russian Federation in the Council of Europe, call for strengthened co-operation between the UN and the Council of Europe, notably in order to promptly restore and maintain peace and security based on respect of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of any state, ensure the observance of human rights and international humanitarian law during the hostilities, provide redress to victims and bring to justice to all those responsible for the violations of international law.”
China, Brazil and India voted with 119 other countries for the resolution. Russia voted against, along with Syria, Belarus, North Korea and Nicaragua. SA abstained. It was a moment. We were isolated among the Brics members on Ukraine.
When this was pointed out the government’s oleaginous foreign affairs spokesman, Clayson Monyela, went into overdrive. Our position on the Russian invasion is not neutral, he harrumphed, it is non-aligned. “The 120 members of the Non-Aligned Movement who have adopted a similar principled position like ours won’t agree that their stance is ‘silly political semantics’. You may want to read about the movement, its approach to global politics, and perhaps its influence,” he sneered on Twitter.
The Non-Aligned Movement, created in 1961, has lost much of its relevance. Its founders were Yugoslavia’s Tito, India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Ghana’s Nkrumah and Indonesia’s Suharto. Each of those countries, apart from Serbia, which also abstained, voted for the resolution, as did most of the rest of the non-aligned movement, even Zimbabwe.
Monyela fancies himself a warrior on the internet, happy to goad Western ambassadors here who struggle with SA’s submission to the Russian war in Ukraine. We blame the West. He has at least stopped “what-abouting” regarding the Palestinians because, of course, we withdrew our ambassador from Israel in protest and have kept our man on in Moscow.
Why? I’ve seen too many articles asking why we would jeopardise our vast trade ties with the West to support Russia. The obvious — the only — answer is that the Russians are financing the ANC. A few months ago the ANC couldn’t pay staff salaries. Now it can?
Our diplomacy is a joke on the international circuit. Our embassies are headed predominantly by political appointments now, used by all ANC presidents to reward or console fallen comrades. They all learn the same script: Palestine, the Western Sahara, racism, imperialism.
You have to wonder how President Cyril Ramaphosa’s team of emissaries to the US are doing. Are they back? The team — led by Ramaphosa’s security adviser, Sydney Mufamadi, arguably the most boring man in our entire body politic, and including deputy foreign minister Alvin Botes, fresh from an ass-kissing ANC party visit to Moscow — were in the US to try to reassure disenchanted political leaders there that the Russian alliance is just a principled position of non-alignment in an increasingly repolarising world, and to please not terminate our inclusion in the African Growth & Opportunities Act (Agoa), under which we export everything from cars to oranges to the US, duty free.
It’s quite a gig, but Ramaphosa’s spokesman, Vincent Magwenya, vying for leadership in the smooth-talking BS stakes with Monyela, says the delegation was just part of the ongoing relationship with the US, blah blah ... But pull Agoa out from under our feet and that’s it for SA. Nomaindia Mfeketo, a former catastrophic mayor of Cape Town, is somehow now our ambassador in Washington. Heaven help us.
The only one in the team of any merit was Mfeketo’s direct boss, international relations director-general Zane Dangor. But he’s also old ANC — the late Jesse Duarte’s brother — and he’ll know his primary job is to protect his party from any foul consequences of the way it has chosen to finance itself.
Some perfectly reasonable people enjoy the challenge. Have a go, they dare the West – whether we cosy up to the Russians or ignore our climate change avowals, we’re simply too strategically important to walk away from. The apartheid government thought so too, and there might be some truth in it. But there’s no new investment coming our way. Zilch, even if we hang on in Agoa. And then, with the battle for the Pacific really gathering pace as China presses for control of its seas, watch the Kenyans. They have also picked sides — the West, and it will soon show in its growing prosperity.
We needlessly kissed the US and Europe away, just as we had them on their knees, apologising for everything. We walked away, pleased as punch to be invited into the Brics even though our tiny market makes us an economic outlier and politically unimportant. Ramaphosa has in every significant way lost the West.
Not inviting Russia’s Vladimir Putin here for a Brics summit in Durban in August will not change that. Earlier this year, Ramaphosa was happy to receive Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, as he visited his whiny local counterpart, Naledi Pandor. In the same week the EU’s foreign minister, Josep Borrell, was also in Pretoria. He tried to get time with Ramaphosa but was ignored. It doesn’t help much now to complain about our problems getting orange exports into the EU. It isn’t a trade problem. It’s a diplomatic catastrophe.
I watched Pandor on TV the other day. She was awful. “Why is it that every time SA has an important event there are these types of actions by the ICC?” she asked in relation to the charges laid by the International Criminal Court — independent of her or SA — against Putin for the abduction of children from Ukraine to Russia.
This is our diplomat in chief. This is the best she can do. Thirty years in power and still just another incurable victim.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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