The ANC has taken some flak for sending a delegation to Moscow for a conference over the weekend, but after Bheki Cele announced on Friday that South Africans are being murdered at a rate of roughly 84 per day, I suppose it made sense: unless you’re getting drafted to Ukraine or criticising Vladimir Putin, you’re much safer in Moscow than back home.
I can’t tell you if the “Forum of Supporters of the Struggle Against Modern Practices of Neocolonialism — For the Freedom of Nations” achieved all its political goals. When I looked out of my window this morning the West was still there, and quite a lot of nations remained very much not free, including Russia.
Still, I’m sure it provided a real boost to the people who support and service these sorts of get-togethers, like limo drivers, sex workers, caterers and Fikile Mbalula. Certainly, the ANC figurehead seemed in high spirits on Sunday evening as he tweeted a picture of himself on Russian state television with the caption: “From Russia — the meeting of minds the new world order in motion [sic]”.
Now, some might suggest that this tweet is really all that needs to be said about any world order that includes Mbalula and the ANC. In his defence though, I should point out that he didn’t make any claims about the size or quality of the minds that were meeting in Moscow. I mean, when a tiny, swivel-eyed remora attaches itself to the chin of a shark it is still, technically, a partnership between two fishes.
Likewise, he offered no opinion on where SA might feature in the new world order. I know there’s been plenty of debate over this since the Brics bloc started expanding, with some pundits suggesting we will just be running the coat check while others argue that we should at least be allowed to answer the phones. Personally, I suspect one of our first assignments might be to lead Africa’s heroic, anticolonial pushback against green energy.
According to recent reports, new Bric member Saudi Arabia has understood that it isn’t going to be able to fall back on tourism after all (golf only goes so far in a desert, and when you’ve seen one murdered and dismembered journalist you’ve seen them all) and has instead decided to focus on building demand for its oil in Africa.
Indeed, any day now I expect to start seeing advertisements, reminiscent of the US far right, insisting that solar panels are Satan’s tanning bed and that the only way to breath in the sweet air of freedom is to suck it out of your SUV’s tailpipe.
However, in Africa they may well be supercharged by the rhetoric of the anticolonial left. I can easily imagine gas-guzzling and coal-burning becoming acts of political defiance, as Saudi and SA spin doctors ramp up their condemnation of the green Global North for trying to stop Africans from having the same abundance of energy it had before it pulled the ladder up behind it.
But I digress. The point is, everybody probably had a high old time in Moscow, the warm, fuzzy nostalgia of the old Warsaw Pact days made even sweeter by the West’s current quagmire in Israel, where the so-called rules-based order continues to vacillate about a ceasefire despite Israel having killed (even by the Israeli Defense Forces’ own conservative estimates) a substantially higher proportion of the civilian population of Gaza than the proportion of civilians killed in British cities by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941.
Foreign elections
Yes, the new power bloc is having its moment in the sun. Which might explain why we’ve heard so much about solidarity and a multipolar world and so little about the Kremlin meddling in foreign elections.
Indeed, the worries about Russian bot farms that were so incendiary in 2016 and 2020 seem to be almost entirely absent now. Then again, perhaps Vladimir Putin doesn’t need to manipulate Facebook to influence the US election, given the formidable team of democracy-wreckers working round the clock to swing it Donald Trump’s way. Yes, Joe Biden and the Democrats are doing a perfect job of it all by themselves.
I’m exaggerating, of course. Biden isn’t going to take any of this lying down. I mean, yes, he will be literally lying down, ’til at least this afternoon, but metaphorically he’ll be all over it, just as soon as he remembers why he came into the room.
Luckily for his handlers, there’s a fresh crisis to throw into the electioneering blender: last week a report by the US House intelligence committee warned that Russia might use a nuclear weapon to knock out the planet’s satellites. While this would obviously be great for Biden, who loses 1,000 voters every time he speaks on national TV, it would plunge the world into chaos.
And yet I know we would survive, because far away from the egos and frailties of tyrants and geriatrics one very special group of people has already learnt to thrive in failure and collapse. In their world, the satellites went down years ago. There is no communication, no progress, no plan. A lot of the time there’s not even electricity. But still, they have thrived.
Yes, if it all goes to hell, Mbalula and the ANC can teach the broken world how to get rich. A new world order. A meeting of minds.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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