I’ve always envied the diplomatic life. The government department you work for — unless you’re a spy disguised as a cultural attaché — produces nothing and mostly no-one cares. It pays salaries, rent and travel. No pressure. What’s not to like?
In South Africa our foreign ministry, renamed in a revolutionary act the department of international relations & co-operation (Dirco) by Jacob Zuma in 2009, is granted more than R7bn a year to just spend on travel, salaries and accommodation.
If I had friends in high places I’d be our ambassador to Spain. The embassy in Madrid is on the corner of Claudia Coello and Ortega y Gasset in Salamanca, easily the most desirable location pin in Europe. The shopping, restaurants and food markets are fantastic and the Spanish are happy people, worldly and thoughtful.
Dirco is a strange beast though. It has a high profile and yet we know almost nothing about what goes on inside it, or why. It’s a closed space, reluctant to put itself about. That might explain why there’s just one specialist journalist in foreign policy still working in South Africa and he, like me, is getting on.
What’s going on?
Dirco doesn’t hide so much as duck and weave — it is good about making public all the statements it makes, but in my experience it’s pretty hard to pick up a phone and speak to anyone there informally.
Why informally? Because while not everything in relations between countries can be publicly known, the media cannot work in a vacuum. Journalists need guidance from sources they trust, and often about what not to write.
Knowing what to ignore matters. I’ve never paid the slightest attention to the rumour favoured by the political right that Iran bailed out the ANC so it could pay salaries — there’s not a shred of evidence to prove it, and there’s more than enough money among BEE elites here to have easily dealt with so trifling a problem.
I have tried though, and totally failed, to develop such a relationship in Dirco. Attempts to secure an interview, simply to introduce myself, to director-general Zane Dangor came to nought. I didn’t even get a reply when I tried a month or so ago through the established channels.
So I gave up, and was a little stung when I saw the Daily Maverick had scored a long interview with him, and when news agency Reuters had him on the record about relations with the US, the Iran war and other issues.
Fine. Some you win, etc … and what he said was predictable. Still, I’m not only interested in foreign policy, I’m also concerned about ours. It’s not just that we fail to be the nonaligned middle power we want to be; it’s that the whole expression of South African foreign policy seems to be whatever President Cyril Ramaphosa wants it to be.
A case in point: this week we appointed a new ambassador to China — a post that had been vacant for almost a year. At the same time we appointed a chargé d’affaires to run the otherwise rudderless embassy in Washington DC.
This is a bit mad, I think, and confirms my fears. Given the state of our relationship with the world’s biggest economy, a chargé will have no impact and the notion abroad that it is somehow Ramaphosa’s deep strategy not to have a full ambassador in the US right now just has to be nonsense.
The better explanation is probably chaos, and mainly in the presidential mind. I can’t prove it, but I did a quick search on how many of our many many embassies have no ambassadors in place.
Empty embassies
According to the Dirco website we have embassies we either own or rent, but in which we have no leadership, in Belgium, Benin, Cuba, Denmark, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Eswatini, France, Germany, Ghana, Guinea, Italy, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kenya, South Korea, Kuwait, Liberia, Malaysia, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Senegal, Turkey, Uganda, the US, the UAE and Zimbabwe.
I’m not sure if the new ambassador to Beijing has got there yet, but if she hasn’t we have about 75% of the world’s GDP covered by leaderless embassies. It’s embarrassing. The chargé for Washington may be a capable guy, but who cares about a chargé? Ramaphosa himself was quick to flick away the US chargé in Pretoria as way too junior to hand the G20 gavel over to in November.
The question is, why so many empty seats at so many embassies? ’Sup Zane? Is it all a grand presidential strategy? Standing outside looking in, Dirco begins to look a lot like the rest of our government — kind of empty.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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