Johannesburg - Let’s face it – South Africa’s often wishy-washy foreign policy has resulted in unnecessary pressure on the government to stay put as a traditional ally of the West.
The truth is, an ANC-led post-apartheid government has friends in places that the West frowns upon – Russia, China, Palestine, Cuba and Venezuela, among others. These friendships were formed during the dark days of apartheid when the ANC, as a liberation movement, was waging a noble struggle to topple the white minority regime led by the erstwhile Nationalist Party.
However, despite Nelson Mandela’s brave insistence that no Western or any power should dictate to the new SA who her allies should be, the latter days of ANC rule have been characterised by evidence of a lack of courage in the country’s convictions.
Democratic SA had been correctly founded on the ethos of equal opportunities for all, regardless of race, creed, culture or historical background. Since our first democratic elections in April 1994, the world has expressed awe and admiration at how Mandela et al managed to reach a negotiated settlement when the odds had seemed oh so stacked against the possibility. Our country’s Constitution has been hailed around the world as one of the very best.
We have been regarded and heralded as the epitome of hope for the human race. We managed to demonstrate to an uncertain world that where there’s a will, there’s a way. The sad part about the ANC-led government in global politics is the strange pursuit to be everything to everyone.
SA cannot hope to appease the whole of the nations of the world through a seemingly non-committal foreign policy. Allies and enemies alike cannot trust such egg-dancing. Our government has to become bolder in the articulation of the SA’s foreign policy, as Mandela had demonstrated whilst the dice were heavily loaded against him and his party.
International cooperation is a desirable goal in any country’s development. Indeed, no country can be an island, particularly in a constantly globalising international world order. We live in one colossal global village that ideally should be united in its diversity. However, the reality of our contemporary geopolitics provides us ample evidence that ours is a truly uneven, cruel and selfish global community.
The West, in particular, has displayed a constantly selfish trait to enrich themselves at the cost of weaker, poorer nations of sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. The Global South has for far too long been a playground of the unscrupulous nations of the Global North, who still suffer a terrible hangover from the colonial era characterised by white supremacist privileges.
Thankfully, those days are gone! In part, we should thank the heroic rise of China as a superpower that practically poses a major challenge to US hegemony. Credit is also due to the strategic repositioning of Russia as a nuclear power in the post-Soviet Union era. The West had boasted since the end of the Cold War that the reconfiguration of the international world order should remain premised on their dose and form of democracy. The rise of this self-righteous West-equals-good bloc and everything else that should pass through their mischievously selfish lenses, must come to an end.
Countries such as China, Russia, India, Brazil and SA, among others, need to continue to take a lead on behalf of the Global South in the re-making and re-shaping of our global community into a more accommodative and non-discriminatory one. All the five above-mentioned nations, incidentally, form officially what is known as BRICS, an emerging bloc that poses a nightmare to the unsavoury dominance of the Global North in international relations.
In August, BRICS has a scheduled summit set to take place in SA. All heads of state of the BRICS members are expected to land on our shores around the same time to tackle challengingly complex geopolitical issues. A spanner has typically been thrown into their preparation work for the BRICS summit; the International Criminal Court (ICC) has recently issued a contentious warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a close ally of SA and a key member of BRICS.
As a signatory to the Rome Statute, SA is expected to arrest President Putin based on the ICC’s debatable warrant of arrest. The ICC accuses President Putin and the Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, of the “unlawful deportation of children from occupied areas of Ukraine”. In a raging war situation, these are areas that are under sporadic bombardment by the Western-backed Ukrainian forces.
One could therefore argue that the children have been whisked to Russia for their safety. The pro-Russian Donbas region in the east of Ukraine has officially broken away from Kyiv’s authority in the aftermath of the current war. In 2014, following the Western-supported coup that ousted a pro-Russian Ukrainian president from power, Viktor Yanukovych, during violent uprisings that left dozens dead or injured, Crimea seceded from Ukraine and was reincorporated into the Russian Federation till this day.
The administration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is heavily backed by the US, the EU and Nato in an unprecedented resolve to fight Russia in a proxy war. Kyiv has been buoyed by this unequivocal financial, military and diplomatic support that has sought to isolate Russia internationally through a barrage of economic sanctions, coupled with the coercion of weaker nations of the global south to turn against Russia.
This is where SA is particularly challenged. Pretoria has frequently reiterated its non-aligned stance in the war, calling for a negotiated truce between the warring sides. This stance has not sat too well with the US and its allies, and SA continues to be under the constant eye of the camouflaged Western storm. This subtle hostility being waged against SA by Western warmongers who want no peace is likely to deteriorate into open animosity based on nothing else but geopolitical differences.
Trigger-happy Western nations, led by the US, are truly equipped to cause great harm to SA. Their penchant to club together like marauding gangs is well-documented. This is precisely why SA should reappraise the country’s foreign policy, particularly concerning the West. Most of the nations of the world are turning to China and the East amid the gradual reconfiguration of global politics.
Soon, the West’s dominance of geopolitics will be history. The East is the future, undoubtedly. In less than a decade, geopolitical economists forecast that China will overtake the US as the world’s largest economy. The de-dollarisation of the global economy, led mainly by BRICS and other nations engaging in bilateral transactions, is a stark indicator that the days of the US hegemony are numbered.
This is the picture that career diplomats at Dirco should be analysing, and advising Minister Naledi Pandor and President Cyril Ramaphosa accordingly. You cannot base foreign policy on being everything to everybody, as Mandela demonstrated.
Russia was with the ANC in the trenches while fighting to liberate SA. No one can obliterate this history. China, too, through the Mao connection, can lay a claim to much more credible historical ties with the ANC than the US, UK and other Western colonisers combined. Pretoria should not be cowed by muted threats of Western sanctions when electing to remain morally upright in its relations with the rest of the international community.
And, as the BRICS summit fast approaches, methinks for the Ramaphosa administration to deny Western noise-makers the opportunity to bark at the “failure to arrest Putin”, Pretoria should swap its hosting right with Russia.
In that way, SA can concentrate on its next possible step, which will be to peel off from the ICC. Critical nations of the world are not signatories to the Rome Statute. They include, notably, the US and BRICS leading members in Russia, India and China.
If SA’s willingness to make the universe a better place could become a geopolitical tool to use against Pretoria by self-serving nations, then I see no wisdom in signing up for the self-harming Rome Statute just to look progressive.
Foreign policy should first and foremost be based on national interest, not self-harm. If the ICC can fall into the trap of being turned into a tool of Western nations in pursuit of their nefarious objectives against the global south, then it would prove to be an institution that is good for nothing. International law should be applied without fear or favour, and also equally among all nations, big or small. Anything else is a gimmick!