Roelf Meyer will most likely be just fine as our ambassador to Washington. And now that EFF leader Julius Malema has been sentenced to jail after firing shots in the air at a stadium near East London (now, ludicrously, KuGompo City) in 2018, he’ll at least be able to tell US critics of the Kill the Boer song of the dire difficulties confronting the man who has sung it loudest and longest.
Malema will appeal his sentence and may come to rely, as former president Jacob Zuma has, on a ponderous judicial system unable to defend itself against expensive legal tacticians. The sentence may make a martyr of Malema, but Meyer will be able to point to many appeals as evidence of a fair, if not perfect, legal system at work.
Meyer’s appointment by President Cyril Ramaphosa this week was too long in coming. And if it is important now, it would have been six months ago too. Has Ramaphosa been trying to persuade him or has he been put under pressure to finally decide? If the latter, it is another blemish on the president’s record in office. Why does so much die on this man’s desk?
A former apartheid National Party member and cabinet minister, Meyer is best known as Ramaphosa’s negotiating partner in the run-up to our first democratic elections in 1994. The two are old friends. On the right, Afrikaner groups denounce the appointment — Meyer is a turncoat, quick to swap out one principle for another when it suited him. For the left, he is too old and too white. ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba says Meyer is still the same old Afrikaner Nat he always was.
That, like much of what Mashaba says, is tripe, but there’s a real danger Meyer, even in the US, could become trapped in Afrikaner politics. Donald Trump is captured by modern-day Afrikaner nationalists and believes there’s an active genocide against white Afrikaner farmers. He slapped big tariffs on us and has prevented South Africa from participating in the G20 this year. The Afrikaner right is not going to let its prize orange in the White House go without a fight. If it can’t convert Meyer, then it’ll work hard in Washington to discredit him.
If it can’t convert Meyer, then the Afrikaner Right will work hard in Washington to discredit him.
Two attempts by Ramaphosa to appoint ANC colleagues to represent him in Washington — first, as ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, and then, as a special envoy, Mcebisi Jonas— were rebuffed. White House officials say the South Africans have been told what the conditions are for normalising relations: the ANC must denounce the singing of Kill the Boer, lift BEE rules for US companies investing here, strike provisions for expropriation without compensation from the statute books and make farm murders a priority crime.
Meyer will have to deal with these as legislation makes its way through Congress that could end with sanctions against government leaders. And while Malema has been “dealt with” in the courts, Meyer will have no mandate to negotiate his way around the other US demands. And Ramaphosa has no room to manoeuvre on them either, if he is to have any influence on who the ANC chooses to replace him as leader at the end of 2027. The president needs his successor to keep his reforms intact.
We will quickly see what the new ambassador is made of. Outside Trump’s delirium about white Afrikaners, two issues will stalk Meyer. The most dangerous is the 2023 South African case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Many countries now, at least tacitly, support that position, but Israel’s influence in and over the US government is profound.
Second, the ANC’s inexplicable affection for the religious fanatics who rule Iran has made enemies in the US. The ANC might not have taken money from the mullahs, as often suggested, but our moral and diplomatic support is unmistakable. We recently declined to back a UN resolution denouncing the mass killings by the Iranian regime of protesters in cities at the start of the year.
Trying to explain this, the director-general of the department of international relations & co-operation, Zane Dangor, claims that Pretoria instead wanted an “independent” inquiry to examine the “totality” of conditions on the ground. Some protesters seemed to have been armed, he said. So what? The protesters deserved what happened to them?
This is the level of weasel and deception Meyer will have to defend in Washington. South Africans were rightly outraged when countries made similar arguments in defence of South Africa 40 or 50 years ago. Apartheid was not that bad, they said. The “blacks” were themselves terrorists.
Dangor will be Meyer’s immediate boss when he gets to Washington. Heaven help him.
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