BIG READ: Why SA needs a new foreign policy

Johannesburg G20 is over, the jets have left and back home the government of national unity (GNU) continues the task of patching together a new foreign policy to reconcile the vast gaps between ANC and DA positions.

It seems inevitable that a superficial patchwork will emerge that bears the hallmarks of past follies with a few common sense compromises, forced on it by a fast-changing global order.

But what would a first-rate 2020s South African foreign policy look like?

Last month a deal was finally agreed in the GNU to implement the sufficient consensus rule that new policy requires 60% support, so DA influence will grow.

This is an opportunity to start bridging the chasm between where we are and where a modern full-functioning state should be, so it’s worth starting ambitiously — by imagining a truly effective South African foreign policy for an effective 21st century state.

While multilateral events such as the G20 are useful to give us a seat at the big boys’ table, the decades that Tshwane has devoted to prioritising multilateral reform will not bring the sizeable win that comes from more fundamental new policy thinking.

That’s because the focus on Global South power and sustainable development goals will benefit those countries most for which effective bilateral relations and the other legs of sound national policy are in place.

We don’t have that.

This multilateral obsession is a hangover from ANC days when it was truly vital in fighting apartheid — from Nelson Mandela’s 1940s awakening to the potential of the Atlantic Charter and the UN to promote the self-determination that was rightly the ANC’s prime goal.

President Thabo Mbeki continued on this path, committing to a huge reform of the UN, the IMF and others because he and his ANC peers had spent most of their exile years among diplomats, who naturally gravitated to notions of a fairer world order.

But a 21st century foreign policy for a country with South Africa’s sophisticated potential needs to be cohesively integrated with a functioning economic development plan and defence policy.

We have neither.

Our National Development Plan (NDP) is 13 years old, and the most recent Defence Review was in 2015. Neither has been effectively implemented or monitored against the targets they set.

Take the NDP. Instead of meeting or getting close to our upbeat economic targets, we plunged in the opposite direction. The NDP unemployment target for 2030 was 6%. Instead we hover around 35% — a substantial and steady deterioration.

Economic growth was supposed to be 5% each year, yet we have averaged less than 1% since 2010. That is below population growth, which means the average South African has become worse off each year. That isn’t just a miss, it’s such a severe deviation in the opposite direction that the 2012 NDP is no longer a valid document.

We are the most industrialised economy on the continent with more or less its worst growth rate. This year Namibia expects 5%, Zimbabwe 6%, Mozambique about 4%. In a few decades Kenya has narrowed the gap with us hugely.

In 2012, the NDP was a useful way to lay out the reforms needed. Most still are. But it contained hundreds of priorities, none of which had effective presidential backing or other reform champions in government. So directors-general did what bureaucrats do the world over — they attached NDP policy goals to existing budget items, and nothing changed. Viewers of Yes Minister will understand.

The development plans of our Brics peers, and those African countries that have shown rapid growth that is not purely dependent on a single commodity such as oil or gold — yes, there are several — have a few core priorities. They isolate economic sectors linked to juicy foreign markets.

When Japan began its spectacular postwar rise, it did not choose clothing and electronics manufacturing just because they seemed like the start of recovery. They observed that the US army was in neighbouring Korea fighting a war, so they had a ready export market. They made the US Army’s uniforms. Foreign policy dovetailed with development.

Ethiopia’s truly spectacular growth until civil war cruelly intervened in 2019 was based on agriculture, including cut flowers and canned foods, because there was a market for them in Europe.

Defence

Our most recent Defence Review, in 2015, highlighted the tragic Battle of Bangui by remarking that it should have brought the government down. But lessons were not learnt, and last year we had a humiliating repetition in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Did anyone in cabinet consider the 2015 Defence Review?

The rationale for being in the Central African Republic (CAR) in 2013 was to train and support government troops. When the rebels arrived, the government troops fled. They didn’t fight.

Tragically, our troops did, very bravely and skilfully, according to the French officers who observed the fighting. The purpose had disappeared, but our politicians did not issue the instruction to stop in time. When troops were trying to leave, there was no airlift capacity to rescue them.

Twelve years later, we still lacked airlift capacity, yet we got caught up in a war we had not properly considered. One clue to our confused defence and foreign policy: we were fighting Rwanda and their allies in the DRC, while simultaneously fighting Isis alongside ally Rwanda in northern Mozambique.

Rwanda knows exactly why it’s fighting both. Rwanda made our troops stew at their pleasure, delaying and controlling our travel arrangements home.

A new Defence Review is overdue. It needs to take into account decades of budget cuts, the piling up of unserviced equipment, damaged morale, and the continued absence of suitable airlift and other essential capacity.

Admirals and generals who bleat that they must get more budget have a point — one only worth considering once they plan to have fewer admirals than ships, divert some existing budget to maintenance, and set out which kit must be prioritised under an inevitably reduced budget.

The policy lesson of Bangui and the eastern DRC debacles is that we have to roll back our participation in African battles, at least until we have the right equipment to protect our troops and win, and better understand if the mission is wise.

China, Russia and Brics

If there was any doubt that South Africa must be genuinely nonaligned, global turmoil has removed it. Membership of Brics gives us another useful seat at the table, but we need to be clear about what Brics isn’t.

The era of Trump, China’s rise to superpower status and the shift from to a unipolar order in 1990 and a multipolar world from about 2010, requires nothing less than a thorough reassessment.

Brics is not a security alliance such as Nato. It’s a work-in-progress by the Global South, whose main players know how much they disagree with each other on important issues.

Brics members regularly take adversarial sides diplomatically. India has no hesitation in building strong security ties with the US. A few years ago Indian and Chinese soldiers shot at each other and a few dozen died.

We have democracy in common with India and Brazil. Genuine nonalignment allows us to speak out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, because it was a clear violation of a state’s sovereignty.

Foreign policy requires an informed balance between a nation’s interests and its values. Our relations with China require that balance.

Over the past decade, the ANC sent thousands —perhaps even tens of thousands — of South Africans to train in China. Most were party and government officials, at all levels right to the top. As president, Jacob Zuma instructed his whole cabinet to join the pilgrimage.

It turns out that the curriculum was designed by the Chinese Communist Party, who taught them what a great political system China has, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” — the very sleight of hand it uses at home to disguise its history-making turn to Japanese and Singapore’s development models that pulled an eye-watering 800-million people out of poverty.

But South Africans did not bring back lessons about China’s rapid growth. Instead, they heard that China’s one-party state was better than our constitutional democracy.

If foreign policy is based on our values and interests, why didn’t South Africans go and teach the Chinese about our democratic constitution, and ask them to teach us how they got double-digit growth rates?

They didn’t emulate China’s “mayor economy”. Most Chinese mayors, while membership of the party is a prerequisite, are engineers, who earn promotion based on strictly capitalist criteria: how much economic growth, private investment, foreign investment and, last and least important, government investment they garner.

When China comes here they know what minerals they want and they get them. The same with Russia. What is our plan to advance South Africa when we interact with both countries?

My plea for South Africa to have more agency in interaction with major powers is not isolated. In the international relations literature, several African academics argue the same thing — that their governments too often lack agency.

They accept what they’re offered. Too often, of course, what they’re offered is a bribe, for themselves, for the governing party, and usually for both.

But there is an important difference between how Russia and China engage in Africa. In his thesis written while apparently unemployed in the late 1990s, Vladimir Putin explained his vision — to build Russia’s mining and energy economy, and use it to build its geostrategic influence.

That is exactly what he has done. In practice, the component of mercenaries-cum-soldiers that was the Wagner group and is now called the Afrika Korps often go with its mining investments. After replacing South Africa in the CAR, Wagner used its military muscle to control mines. The CAR’s president is supplied with a Russian national security adviser and government-friendly Russian owned newspapers and radio.

Those who have dealt with both nationals say China is different in two respects — it does not get involved in war, and it is interested in diversified economic development.

That does not mean Chinese firms are angels. Bribes are paid if they are accepted. But if China wants something a country has, an honest deal in the interests of the country is also possible.

One of the underlying reasons for this difference is China is built around development, diversified to include the job creating sectors in which productivity gains most easily translate into growth. If South Africa has competent people with a public interest agenda, China can be a productive partner. Just never come to a meeting unprepared.

Many in the DA have long argued that we should get out of Brics because it’s dominated by undemocratic regimes that violate human rights. Then the DA went into the cabinet.

Within days, DA leader John Steenhuisen was in Beijing as agriculture minister. It was the right move. He announced an agreement with China marking “a major breakthrough … at a time when diversification is essential for our agricultural resilience” to make “South African agriculture less dependent on traditional buyers and more responsive to new consumption patterns such as China’s growing middle class”.

The historic rise of Asia has fundamentally changed the world. In the face of Trump’s tariffs, Steenhuisen went to China-sceptical neighbours in Southeast Asia to develop other markets. This apparent DA flip-flop should be explained. Now the DA is in government, it confronts hard but necessary choices.

Upping our game is urgent, because the next few years will see more shocks. The US and China are likely to remain superpowers, but both face volatile politics and volatile economies.

The US faces an artificial intelligence share price bubble and an overdue market correction. China’s growth rate has slipped, it has debt bubbles in property and local government, and an ageing and shrinking working age population.

Europe’s support for South Africa at the G20 and elsewhere is to be valued, but if our critical minerals deal is to mean anything we need a fundamental reform of government mining policy or it will amount to a fraction of its potential.

As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, one of the few world leaders who seems to have a plan, says, do what’s in your control. So much is. Try not to lose sleep over what you can’t.

Doing what’s within our control aggressively, with nuance and agency will take us a long way.

• Matisonn is executive director of Ideas for Africa and a former senior UN official.