As foreign minister Naledi Pandor treads a very narrow ledge. Given our poorly disguised neutrality in the Russian invasion of Ukraine she has had to strike all kinds of poses since her boss, Cyril Ramaphosa, forced her to retract her instinctive human response on February 24 last year, when the invasion began.
She had quickly condemned the invasion on the day and called on the Russians to get out of sovereign Ukrainian territory. Ramaphosa told her to withdraw her statement. It’s safe to assume that the ANC is partly financed by the Russians. There is no other logical explanation for the government’s position on the invasion.
“Pandor: SA is not for sale,” said a loud Business Day front-page lead on Thursday, June 15. By the following Monday she had followed Ramaphosa through Ukraine and Russia on a dubious “peace mission”, and the newspaper was able to report that “SA remains on track to host Brics summit”, this to imply that even though the International Criminal Court has an arrest warrant out for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, some agreement between him and Ramaphosa had been reached that would allow the August summit in Johannesburg to proceed.
That probably meant Putin, facing possible arrest here, had agreed, or decided anyway, not to attend. This, it turns out, is not a man of much moral courage, as we were all soon to discover. For just one weekend later an ally of Putins’, Yevgeny Prigozhin, led a large detachment of his private militia, the Wagner Group, from the Ukraine battle in an armoured charge towards Moscow, the Russian capital in what Putin, miles from Moscow, denounced as an act of betrayal.
It looked like a coup attempt, with Prigozhin targeting Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu, who Prigozhin says is losing the war. The Wagner column shot down several Russian military aircraft on the way and halted just 200km from Moscow after calls between Putin and Prigozhin.
In a murky deal, Prigozhin turned his column around, back through towns where they had a day earlier been greeted like liberating heroes, and has since gone into exile in Belarus. Putin has been trying to put on a brave face but his aura of invincibility is gone. Thrust into a position to put down a blatant mutiny, he chose rather to do a deal.
“There was no mutiny in Russia,” Pandor grandly declared on Tuesday after meeting her German counterpart Annalena Baerbock, according to a News24 report. The German view of what had happened was different. “This weekends’ events show that this illegal war on aggression is not only an attack on the European peace order, but that Putin was destroying his own country with this war,” Baerbock said.
For Pandor, on her slippery ethical ledge, there was no mutiny. “There was an attempted mutiny,” she said. If that is seriously the advice of her whole department you have to wonder what order of medical intervention might be required there. What is it when a column of armed brigands roll up the highway to Moscow flicking aside traffic barriers erected by the regime to stop them, shoot Russian military personnel, destroy Russian military aircraft and then simply allowed to stop, keep their weapons and armour, and head south again, with the leader quietly packed off to a neighbouring satellite which he will no doubt soon leave?
If Pandor doesn’t recognise defective leadership she has been spending too much time with Ramaphosa. It gets worse for her though. Putin, scrambling to explain himself to a sceptical Russian public, has admitted that the Wagner Group is, in fact, an arm of the Russian state and has been financed by the Russian state for years. That would mean that the Wagner terror unleashed in Africa has been a Russian operation.
What, as an African foreign minister, does Pandor, let alone Ramaphosa, do about that? Their “African” peace mission still has Russian mud on its shoes, and here’s Putin conceding that the interventions of Wagner in Mali, in Sudan and Mozambique, while appearing to be purely mercenary, are, in fact, Russian and official.
Central African Republic
By far the most murderous Wagner presence is in the Central African Republic, which it now largely controls. A new report by a Washington-based investigative outfit called The Sentry, says the Wagner Group has almost complete control of the CAR, installing its president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, in Bangui while it helps itself to the mineral wealth in the rest of the country.
The Sentry is funded by the actor George Clooney, who has become deeply involved in Sudan. Its report on Wagner reckons its attacks on civilians have directly contributed to the fact that more than 5% of the CAR’s entire population died in 2022, an absurdly high rate.
“In CAR,” The Sentry reports, “Wagner has perfected a blueprint for state capture, supporting a criminalised state hijacked by the Central African president and his inner circle, amassing military power, securing access to and plundering precious minerals, and subduing the population with terror.
“As Wagner continues to expand its reach into ever more countries — with Burkina Faso being the most recent example, and Chad being the next target in central Africa — it is likely that the paramilitary group will continue to deploy strategies that have seen success.”
From the AU or African leaders like Ramaphosa and Pandor or indeed anyone on the peace mission, you will hear not a word about this new imperialism in their very midst. It is an inconvenient truth. But history will show that whatever Putin touches, he destroys. Heaven help us.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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