Finally, after many years and much speculation, we’ve discovered where President Cyril Ramaphosa keeps his detachable spine: in a crate with some sniper rifles, a stack of photocopied, useless permits and a larger stack of photocopied, substantially more useless cadres.
Given that the entire SA media contingent spent Friday stuck in a plane in Poland and the rest of the weekend in a plane headed home, I can’t tell you whether the spine was bolted onto Ramaphosa like a sort of brace or was inserted in a less dignified way.
But however it was attached, the fact remains that the president showed more backbone on Saturday than he’s shown in half a decade as he politely asked Vladimir Putin to respect international sovereignty and return the estimated 16,000 Ukrainian children he’s had kidnapped for “adoption” and “re-education” in Russia.
Of course, many of Ramaphosa’s critics will correctly point out that he said it about 16 months and thousands of murdered Ukrainians too late. Others will argue that SA’s self-proclaimed impartiality in the conflict is highly debatable and gives the lie to the whole endeavour.
Certainly, the photos posted on the presidency’s Twitter account suggested a weekend of two halves, with an unsmiling Ramaphosa looking every inch the sombre emissary in Kyiv before heading to Russia to shake Putin’s hand like a nine-year-old meeting a Springbok flyhalf.
Finally, Ramaphosa’s critics might also remind me that he didn’t actually mention stolen Ukrainian children. But this is where that portable spine comes in; because while it’s true that he used less specific language, instead insisting that children “who have been caught up in this conflict should be returned to where they have come from”, his meaning was unmistakable: unless Ukraine has started nipping over the border to kidnap Russian children, Ramaphosa was legitimising the charges levelled against Putin by the International Criminal Court.
It goes without saying that Putin wasn’t listening, reportedly interrupting the African leaders set to speak next with a lecture and showing them exactly how much respect he has for them and their continent.
But Putin was never going to listen. For him, the delegation was nothing more than a stage prop, one that had conveniently set up a “both sides” narrative by also visiting Ukraine, and which therefore allowed him to tell the world that he is as much sinned against as a sinner.
Still, peace envoys need to say certain things in public, to the faces of those waging wars, whether or not they’re listening. And to his credit Ramaphosa said many of those things, and said them plainly. Unfortunately, that fact has been largely overwhelmed by the debacle in Poland.
Journalists will tell you that the pen is mightier than the sword, but when swords are replaced by sniper rifles lacking the correct paperwork, it turns out pens can do nothing but sit on a runway in Warsaw for 24 hours, surreptitiously mopping their armpits with complimentary wet wipes.
The discovery of the small arsenal caused a great deal of excitement both at home and on the tarmac in Poland, but I don’t understand why the president’s security team took any weapons with them at all, being armed, as they were, with the ultimate presidential protection device: Maj-Gen Wally Rhoode.
Rhoode, you will recall, is the man who became briefly famous for failing to report the theft of cash from Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala lodge, and then became briefly pitiful for lying down and allowing the president to drive all sorts of buses over him.
Yes, Rhoode seems to be the very model of a modern major-general, with information vegetable, animal and criminal, as well as the priceless ability to make that information disappear. So why would you bother with all that firepower when bulletproof Wally can simply throw himself over you like a Kevlar blanket, muttering about racist Polish immigration officials while criticism and administrative realities ricochet off him?
Some pundits have described those 24 hours as a national embarrassment. I disagree. If peace missions have any hope of success they must be grounded in honesty and good faith, and I can’t imagine a better way of putting all your cards on the table than by arriving in Europe and saying to the world: we’re incredibly bad at getting the basics right, but we did somehow talk our way out of a race war, so even though we’re going to fall down this gangway as soon as we leave this plane, and then accuse the stairs and gravity of being counterrevolutionary, we might have one or two scraps of wisdom left to offer.
I do wish, however, the brouhaha in Poland hadn’t overshadowed one astonishing footnote. According to defence experts, Russia has fired somewhere around 5,000 missiles and “one-way attack drones” at Ukraine since the start of its invasion; so many, in fact, that it has reportedly almost exhausted its entire prewar stock. By October last year it had destroyed a third of Ukraine’s power stations. In December, it attacked and damaged nine more. And yet on Friday, Ramaphosa travelled from Poland to Kyiv on a train.
The president was right to go to Ukraine and Russia. He was right to lay out the African delegation’s 10-point plan. But until he learns to clip on that spine here at home, we will wait and wait and no trains will come.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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