When Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Ukraine a year ago, he travelled with a party of seven and had a dozen discreetly armed Australian special forces soldiers on the ground to ensure his safety, Australian media reported. Like our own president Cyril Ramaphosa, he entered the Ukraine from Poland on an armoured train, closely guarded by those countries’ forces.
It is a random example. But it raises the question of why Ramaphosa’s personal protection services, led by Wally Rhoode, felt the need to dispatch a plane carrying 120 officers and several crates of heavy weaponry to Europe to keep an eye on the president.
As it turned out, the plane never got to Kyiv and St Petersburg as planned. Rhoode’s team apparently failed to obtain the correct documentation not only for the flight, but also the people and the cargo. News24 reports that this was in spite of the three meetings held with Polish authorities, who spelled out precisely what was required — and that they were warned by the SA Air Force that failure to supply the correct documentation could delay the mission.
Hence, a humiliating fiasco in Warsaw. Up to R16m of SA taxpayers’ money has been wasted on a shambolic security mission that spent three days on Warsaw tarmac and egregiously insulted the Poles for their “racism” before returning home. In diplomatic terms it’s just an astonishingly bad outcome. An apology is due.
The SA Police Service must be held accountable for its disastrous lack of preparation. So too must Rhoode. He should have resigned after he failed to ensure that the president’s Phala Phala robbery was investigated. He certainly should resign now.
But what of the president’s Russia-Ukraine peace mission itself? Ramaphosa did get to Kyiv and St Petersburg and has returned safely home without any help from his phalanx of protectors. Only time will tell whether he and other leaders from the continent achieved something substantive, and they deserve credit for trying. But the early signs are not promising. Ramaphosa said the mission was listened to by both sides. At best, he looked naive; at worst, cynical.
He stood there in Kyiv urging de-escalation in the midst of a Russian missile attack (disgracefully denied by spokesperson Vincent Magwenya). Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky understandably declined the Africans’ offer to broker peace talks with an aggressor with no regard for Ukraine’s sovereignty and no intention of halting the war or giving back Ukrainian territory any time soon.
In St Petersburg, Ramaphosa had hardly finished his peace pitch before Russian President Vladimir Putin interrupted to lecture him and the other African leaders. He offered nothing in response to their pleas to unblock urgent grain exports and end a war which has affected the African continent particularly hard. He rejected their appeals to seek a ceasefire “through negotiations and diplomatic means”, reportedly challenging their plan, which is predicated on internationally accepted borders.
It’s not clear whether Ramaphosa was so naive as to expect that peace could be brokered or was simply cynically making the gesture in an attempt to demonstrate SA’s nonaligned credentials. Either way, one hopes there was much learnt as a result of his mission — because the bill was steep and the reputational damage deep.
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