The Big Read: SA sees no evil, hears no evil

Nelson Mandela's biggest foreign affairs mistake when he came to power in 1994 was to think that he could speak privately to dictators and convince them to "do the right thing".

He did not realise that, despite his global stature, they were not all that impressed by him and were merely dictators: they could not be trusted.

In 1994, and increasingly in 1995, Mandela was begged by human rights activists to condemn the regime of the thieving, murderous "General" Sani Abacha, of Nigeria. Mandela failed to do so, instead choosing to speak privately to the dictator to convince him not to go ahead with the execution of human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight comrades on trumped-up murder charges.

On November 10 1995, Saro-Wiwa and his comrades were taken out of their cells by Abacha's soldiers and hanged. Abacha did this in defiance of international pleas for mercy and despite incontrovertible proof that witnesses had been bribed to implicate Saro-Wiwa and his comrades. Saro-Wiwa was not even in the state in which the murders took place at the time they were committed.

They were all buried in unmarked graves.

After the hanging of the Ogoni Nine, Mandela found his voice: he condemned the hangings and called for Nigeria's immediate suspension from the Commonwealth and the Organisation of African Unity.

President Jacob Zuma had his Saro-Wiwa moment last week. On Monday, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act, a law that has been condemned across the globe, which makes same-sex relationships punishable by life in prison.

What did South Africa do in response? We issued a generic statement softly condemning all countries that had discriminatory gender laws. Not a word about Uganda and the fact that homosexuality there is now punishable by a jail sentence of 14 years for first-time "offenders".

Our weak, Quisling, shameful, response should surprise no one, though. Our ambassador to Uganda is the homophobe Jon Qwelane, who has proudly flaunted his homophobic beliefs - views which are directly at odds with the spirit, values and content of our constitution.

It would not surprise me if he had sent an urgent, hand-written, dispatch to Museveni congratulating him on his signing of the heinous act.

This is who we are now, this is our best foot forward: human rights are okay for us, but we will not lift a finger for anyone else's, anywhere in the world.

The truth is that human rights no longer figure in our conduct of foreign affairs. The fact that our own democracy was built on the mobilisation of human rights voices across the globe does not matter anymore.

Nowadays, we are driven by totally different motives. Anyone who expects South Africa to speak consistently and convincingly on human rights is fooling himself. That South Africa is lost.

The South Africa of today is a country driven by the search to secure energy sources (Uganda has made significant oil discoveries lately), access to minerals and - seemingly most important of all - business.

South Africa is not an energy-rich country and Pretoria has decided that it will ensure that oil and gas continue to be pumped to us at any cost. Human rights and good governance are not a factor in the pursuit of this goal.

Hence our very tight relationship with Angola, for example. The president of that country has been in power since 1979 but such inconvenient facts do not deter us, it seems.

It is the rush to make money from our African brothers and sisters that seems to sit at the heart of our foreign policy. South African companies and billionaires are stomping all over the continent these days, and money is being made by the bucketful. There is nothing wrong with that, of course.

The problem is that, in exchange for access to these markets, South Africa is modelling its foreign policy on China's: see no evil, hear no evil. Crucially, don't say a word about the evil that men do in the country where you operate.

This is who we are now. From the heady heights of 1994, when many of us believed that what is good for us - a full bouquet of human rights - is good for our fellow Africans, we have now descended to the lowest of the low. We just want their money, their oil and their gas.

South Africa has become no better than its colonial oppressors: they came, they raped and - Bible in hand - taught us that homosexuality is wrong. We are behaving exactly as they did. We, too, shall one day leave the countries with which we are dealing as they did, with our tail between our colonialist legs.