In a time of chaos, understanding can be found by going back to the start. The beginning of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s humiliation this weekend was in December 2022, when the ANC discussed its foreign policy pronouncements at its national conference.
Stretched newsrooms were consumed with the Phala Phala affair, and the president himself likely distracted by his apparently imminent resignation. The ANC’s January 8 statement nevertheless contained pitch-perfect Russian talking points on how Nato was the aggressor in Ukraine. It did not mention Russia’s invasion of a peaceful democracy or the mass murder, kidnappings and mass rapes of civilians and children that accompanied the invasion. It is worth quoting at length:
“This is no longer simply a Russia-Ukraine war, as many countries have been drawn into the war under the Nato military alliance. The peace dividend that was promised at the end of the Cold War has been shattered. The conspicuous failure of the current global multilateral system to resolve conflicts in a manner that ensures all-round common security has brought to the fore Nato’s geopolitical interests and hegemonic agenda.”
This is the foundation on which the house of our international relations is built — an embarrassing Cold War ideological vestige in which we are asked not to believe what we see, and to believe what we cannot. In an act of casual intellectual vandalism, it is passed off as “nonalignment”.
In other words, Ramaphosa’s heart was not in this. It was for show — to try to calm waters that have resulted in the rand collapsing to record lows, warnings of dire consequences for local businesses, moves by US senators to boot us out of the African Growth and Opportunity Act trade pact, and further, quieter and ultimately more alarming warnings about drying liquidity in bond markets as foreign investors recoil in distaste.
It seems that Pretoria may have finally heard that we have a big problem in Washington and that a change of optics is necessary. So, a Ramaphosian knot was tied. He would head off to Kyiv and Moscow, rope in some fellow African leaders and unleash our secret weapon — SA soft power. People love a South African. When we speak about reconciliation and conflict we speak with authority. He would patronise Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with talk of de-escalation and off-ramps. Then to Moscow to lecture Russian President Vladimir Putin about peace, negotiation and the UN charter.
The problem is that this is not how people see us any more. In an editorial published in February, this newspaper warned that our naval war games with Russia would see us sail “into the doldrums of international irrelevance”. We warned that “in our contempt for the Ukrainian people as they face this, we discard like trash what remains of our moral authority and our soft power. Our international brand is probably irreversibly despoiled by this affair”.
Where once countries might deal with us on a basis of trust and tolerate our incompetence, the president’s security team was met with hostility and demands of complete regulatory compliance when it got to Europe — and of course our people could not handle it like adults. Reports suggested weapons on the plane were not of the variety you would usually need to protect a president. Given the Lady R scandal among the rest, it should surprise nobody that a Nato member country would not give permission for such a cargo to head into Russia.
Then on Friday Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, made things profoundly worse, telling Ukrainian media that reports of a barrage of Russian cruise missiles being fired at Kyiv while Ramaphosa was in town were “amusing” and “deliberate misinformation”. Aside from being offensive (four civilians were injured by shrapnel from the exploding misinformation, according to Reuters), it was a lie. Ramaphosa had been hustled into a bunker, and Nato-supplied air defence had to be deployed to shoot down Russian rockets.
Disrespect
Amid the excruciating blunders, the matter at hand — the African peace initiative — which proposes the removal of the International Criminal Court’s charges against Putin and the handover of swathes of Ukraine to Russia as a precursor to negotiations, was dismissed out of hand by Zelensky. In turn, Putin was so disinterested in what the Africans had to say that he did not even let them finish speaking. Talk about disrespect.
The trip did nothing for the furtherance of peace and, worse, nothing for Africa — not even commitments on grain exports or a promise from Putin not to create diplomatic hell for SA by insisting on attending the Brics summit here in August.
I wonder whether while touring the mass grave at Bucha, where scenes of outrageous cruelty against civilians had played out, foreign affairs minister Naledi Pandor took time to reflect on her statement that asking Russia to stop attacking Ukraine was “simplistic and infantile”. I wonder if she and her colleagues have thought a little deeper about the idea that commitment to nonalignment does not mean the wholesale abandonment of all principles. In fact, rather the opposite.
In his dreary speech in Moscow, Ramaphosa mentioned the UN Charter as a cornerstone of nonalignment. Indeed, all signatories agree to “respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other states”, and Ramaphosa mentioned the charter in the presence of a man who has repeatedly defiled these principles. He will have to live with the fact that he did not say so.
Do not be distracted by journalists stuck on planes (sympathy notwithstanding) and security details messing up their documentation. The story is that SA has made a bonfire of its international standing and nobody believes what we say any more. Nobody thinks we are “nonaligned” because our true position is in the ANC’s January 8 statement and has been borne out by our conduct since.
Words will not cut it any more. If we are to be taken seriously as nonaligned, and enjoy its benefits, then we urgently need to start acting the part. Ramaphosa just fumbled an important opportunity to do so.
• Parker is Business Day editor-in-chief.
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