Noise and verbiage dominate SA’s current international relations woes, from an expelled diplomat to a crucial health funding halt and US special refugee provision for Afrikaners following years of Solidarity and AfriForum lobbying.
The question must be asked: why the outrage now? Was no-one in charge briefed? If yes, where were the required steps at home and abroad to counteract factually incorrect claims of a “white genocide” in SA? Where was the action to counter pressure from inside the US Congress to nix SA’s tariff-free access under the African Growth & Opportunity Act (Agoa) even before this Trump administration?
One reason perhaps lies in the SA habit of analysing everything as an end in itself, then failing to act with identified steps implemented to deadlines. Hedging bets in the ANC’s shifting factional sands has taught fudginess as a life skill. The DA is learning similar lessons.
Another reason is the at best lacklustre government communicator, the Government Communication & Information System (GCIS). It has been without a permanent director-general since August 2022, when the previous incumbent, who had served in an acting capacity for about seven-and-a-half years, retired.
The 2025-30 national communications strategic framework talks at length of challenges and how the GCIS must drive “sustained, regular, predictable and accurate information to build confidence in government and enhance active citizenship”. Under the theme “A Nation that Works for all”, the GCIS chases the “inspirational, informative and inclusive”, but little emerges except briefings on cabinet meetings, duplicated by provincial and local executives.
A first step would be readouts of international calls, published immediately afterwards. Readouts are international relations 101, whether presidential chats, trade issues or security. SA not doing these is a lost opportunity to get its perspective out.
National over-analysis and jumbled communications do not explain the foreign affairs mess on their own. Another reason is the failure to define the national interest and a national security strategy in a manner that makes these knowable, accessible and up for public discussion. Yet they are at the core not only of domestic policy but also international and trade relations. Ghana’s 2020 national security strategy demonstrates this.
Public debate and parliamentary approval emerged as central to the “urgent” development of a national security strategy in the reports of both the 2018 High Level Review Panel on the State Security Agency (SSA) and the July 2021 civil unrest panel.
Realpolitik demands strategy, action and accountability.
Ministerial promises of this public process were made in the May 2022 state security budget vote. Yet by December 2023 ... nothing. A parliamentary reply to DA MP Kobus Marais said once the national security council had completed a draft national strategy and cabinet had considered it, “the draft will be made available for consultation and input”.
In April 2024 cabinet eventually approved a national security strategy — quietly, secretly ignoring two expert panels’ calls for public and parliamentary processes. A National Council of Provinces parliamentary reply in January 2025 explained that the national security strategy “optimises the use of technology and related advances towards a lean and mean intelligence organisation with products that add value to its clients and the greater good of SA’s national security”.
Who knows what this means? SSA acting director-general Nozuko Bam told a “nightcap session” at the recent 2025 Munich Security Conference that the agency aimed to become “agile enough to start looking at how we can leverage the ability of AI and machine learning into our space. This will require that we change our posture. It will require that we get proper budget because we do not have enough resources to do this work.”
Bam spoke publicly at this global security meeting, but back home the intelligence outfit shrouds her in secrecy. The SSA website has “tbc” against the slot for director-general.
So wackadoodle secrecy is part of the problem alongside over-analysis without action and communication fuzziness. It feeds the domestic poly-crisis, and the international relations mess. It drains what remains of the global goodwill SA was gifted after the 1994 democratic transition and Nelson Mandela presidency.
Realpolitik demands strategy, action and accountability.
• Merten is a veteran political journalist specialising in parliament and governance.
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