Given how badly the ANC-led government is running the country, it cannot surprise us that it’s unable to respond to a major international crisis, such as Russia’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine, with moral clarity. Our government pretends to have a deep commitment to human rights, but in reality it is consistently found wanting, domestically and in the posture it adopts regarding global affairs.
The first foreign policy embarrassment we witnessed this past week was incoherence. Incoherence is worse than siding with an oppressor. It leaves your citizens confused. It leaves our allies confused. It makes it hard for other actors within the international arena to know what to expect of you and therefore reduces your alliance-building bona fides. Simply put, no one can trust a state that is incoherent. Even controversial positions held with some consistency are better than incoherence. It simply makes us look as if we have no idea what we are about morally and politically.
When government argues slavishly for dialogue the one moment, then for Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine the next, then almost immediately thereafter seemingly apologises for asking Russia to withdraw, before finally showing off naked tension between the department of international relations and cooperation (Dirco) and the presidency, it all becomes as clear as mud what SA’s position is. We should probably expect a judicial commission of inquiry soon into how Dirco came to release a statement that reportedly annoyed President Cyril Ramaphosa. After that, of course, we can expect another commission to be set up by Ramaphosa to tell him what his foreign policy should be. Because, you know, indecisiveness and the president are easy bedfellows.
The second foreign policy embarrassment of the past few days was the false moral equivalence in the call for dialogue between Russia and Ukraine. South African ambassador to the latter André Groenewald conducted a cringeworthy television interview with Newzroom Afrika’s Xoli Mngambi on Sunday. Mngambi asked all the correct questions, such as whether Groenewald would agree that Ukraine has been militarily invaded by Russia, despite Russia’s propagandistic framing that the mission was not war as such. Groenewald refused to go off script. The one he stuck to — ignoring a straightforward invitation to be clear that Russia is violating international law — was to repeat ad nauseam that SA is all about dialogue. I was momentarily gobsmacked before reminding myself that this is standard stuff for SA when it comes to foreign policy — a combination of incoherence and moral cowardice.
SA wants to kick for touch on these substantive issues because of pre-democratic memory of liberation movement fighters spending some time in the Soviet Union learning how to better fight the apartheid regime. But someone should tell the ANC and its government that we are now in 2022 and the political fight against apartheid is over.
You cannot call for dialogue and stop there. That type of call is fatuous when the bully is already beating up his victim, and the bully is bigger than the victim, and is motivated by the singular desire to own his victim, literally. Calls for dialogue in that context are an irresponsible refusal to take seriously the facts of the case. Dialogue can only take place if the conditions for productive conversation are in place. Imagine someone is beating you up and I do not intervene or condemn the person, simply watching the violence unfold, then writing a letter to a newspaper saying: “I hereby call for dialogue between the big guy beating up the little guy and the little guy being beaten up.” What SA is doing (or not doing) is that silly, that pointless, that much a performance of moral cowardice. You have to call out the bully and be unequivocal in your condemnation of them violating the law and acting immorally. Even if there is conversation to be facilitated, it can only happen under conditions of mutual respect between the interlocutors.
At any rate, what should be on the talk-shop agenda? How best to stop Russia trampling on Ukraine’s sovereignty? Or perhaps working out the best pathway to allowing it to control Ukraine? The lazy “call for dialogue” is disingenuous when Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agenda is not to resolve a legitimate disagreement with Ukraine, but him having an existential crisis because democracy, flawed as it is, is being entrenched there.
SA wants to kick for touch on these substantive issues because of pre-democratic memory of liberation movement fighters spending some time in the Soviet Union learning how to better fight the apartheid regime. But someone should tell the ANC and its government that we are now in 2022 and the political fight against apartheid is over. They should also be told that the Russia of today is a different geopolitical reality than the one that trained struggle veterans. Today’s Russia is to be negotiated on the basis of our democratic-era interests, constitutional principles and the values that define us now. We cannot design foreign policy based on ANC liberation struggle folklore. Our incoherence reflects just how much the party is trapped by history.
I am not naive enough to imply we must have a foreign policy that does not take cognisance of a multiplicity of interests, including economic and ideological ones. The very idea of a “moral foreign policy” is one that is more alive in international relations theory and academia than in the real world. The global North in particular, now pamphleteering as if it occupies a moral high horse, has been found wanting throughout history.
There is one more possibility. Our government gets too much credit internationally for our liberal constitutional framework. We, as South Africans living here, know the gap between human rights jurisprudence and brutal social realities is still massive.
When former British foreign secretary Robin Cook, for example, argued in 1997 that British foreign policy “must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves”, the Brits imagined themselves signing up to respect international law and support human rights worldwide. Of course, as we saw with Iraq, that country did not care about respecting international law and abandoned all pretence at being guided by moral considerations. In reality, many states adopt the posture of moral or political principle, but end up bargaining within the international system to safeguard economic and other interests. This is why “realism” remains a powerful explanation of the behaviour of nation states within international relations, even though there is a massive body of literature that has challenged it.
The point being that one can, of course, allow for the South African government not to be so simplistic as to disregard competing interests. But this only gets us so far. How, when an issue is morally black and white, is it in our national interest to dither? How too, when we trade with a range of countries in the global North, which are arguably more important to us economically, can we justify moral cowardice by pretending it is overwhelmingly in our domestic economic interest to suck up to Putin? All one is left with to explain our incoherence is nostalgia about ANC cadres spending time in Soviet Russia or indifference about Ukraine because the name of the country and its people do not resonate psycho-politically with us. Both of these options would be a shameless basis for Ramaphosa to be angry with Dirco and minister Naledi Pandor.
There is one more possibility. Our government gets too much credit internationally for our liberal constitutional framework. We, as South Africans living here, know the gap between human rights jurisprudence and brutal social realities is still massive. We have lots of state-sponsored violence against citizens — from Marikana to Life Esidimeni to crackdowns against social movements such as Abahlali baseMjondolo, or soldiers brutalising citizens during the Covid-19 lockdown and more — such that our post-1994 record is at best chequered when it comes to entrenching democratic norms. This is quite apart from the government’s inability to keep us safe from rampant crime, a failure to meet the very first political, legal and ethical duty of any state, which is to provide security for citizens.
How can we export democratic values, and a culture of respecting and upholding human rights, when there is a laundry list of examples of rights violations in SA daily? So sadly, despite 1994 South African exceptionalism, this ANC-led state is not as deeply committed to human rights as we trick ourselves into believing. If you cannot uphold and entrench human rights domestically, then your foreign policy will be incoherent at best, outright immoral at worst.
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