SONGEZO ZIBI | SA’s position on the Ukraine conflict is naive, sentimental and wrong

SA has declined to condemn Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine, a decision that has baffled some, but it need not. It is the government version of the ANC’s support for Putin’s Russia at this critical moment.

There are two books I believe every South African who participates in discourse on SA’s foreign policy should make time to read. They provide historical accounts that illuminate the ANC and its government’s confused and somewhat baffling position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The first is The Hidden Thread: Russia and South Africa in the Soviet Era by former Soviet academics Irina Filatova and Apollon Davidson. The second is External Mission: The ANC in Exile by the late Dutch academic and former editor of Africa Confidential, Stephen Ellis. Both are excellent accounts of how, over the many decades of the struggle against apartheid, the ANC’s world view took shape and metastasised to what it is today.

That world view is hopelessly out of touch with reality but remains a powerful influence on the ANC’s and SA’s foreign policy. In many ways, it also demonstrates the many areas in which the ANC remains married to its historical fantasies, while trying to govern a real country with real people in the real world.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was for many years the biggest provider of material support to the ANC’s liberation struggle. It gave the ANC military and financial support, a package that included ideological indoctrination in the ways of Soviet-style socialism. That indoctrination is now part of the ANC’s public policy soul, informing its political rhetoric and slogans, but in a country that is decidedly not socialist nor does most of its population desire to be.

The ANC still holds on to the idea of a great ideological battle between a ‘neoliberal, capitalist West’ and a ‘progressive left force’ in the form of Russia and China, both repressive regimes.

These contradictions are not new. While the ANC was fighting for a multiparty democracy in the tradition of Western liberal democracies, the Soviet Union was nothing of the sort — and knew it. It was a one-party, repressive police state.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia took over its position at the UN Security Council and in every other international forum. In the consciousness of much of the ANC leadership, most of whom cut their political teeth during the Cold War, Russia remains a deeply entrenched emotional and ideological brother nation.

Filatova and Davidson relate two incidents involving ANC members and leaders that illustrate the point:

“When, in 1992, one of us gave a lecture on Russia in the Transkei on behalf of the SA Institute of International Affairs, the audience became rather impatient at the suggestion that the collapse of the Soviet Union might have been the result of internal reasons, rather than an imperialist plot. One said: ‘Don’t be too possessive of your country. It does not belong to you only, it belongs to all of us’.”

They also tell of an incident that occurred in Lagos in 1999. Then deputy speaker of parliament Baleka Mbete allegedly burst into tears when a fellow MP called the Soviet Union “a failed experiment”. The ANC’s foreign policy analytical framework and lexicon have much less to do with SA’s sovereign interests, and more to do with the party’s historical bonds and sentiment that carry little to no value today.

The Soviet Union’s support for left-wing African liberation organisations had as much to do with its commitment to internationalism as it had to do with seeking potential client states. The US and other Western powers knew this, and did the same by investing money and arms in their opponents or repressive post-liberation regimes across the continent and elsewhere.

To the great powers, SA’s liberation struggle was a proxy in a global tussle between imperial powers who wanted to extend their spheres of influence and prevent the other from gaining complete global dominance. We were nothing more and nothing less, and any belief that there was a deep kinship between the Russian and South African peoples is misplaced, ahistorical and naive.

That is why, when global dynamics changed, Western countries ditched the apartheid regime and feted Nelson Mandela with ticker tape parades, naming streets and institutions after him. This was after decades of labelling him and the ANC “terrorists”.

Yet, the ANC still holds on to the idea of a great ideological battle between a “neoliberal, capitalist West” and a “progressive left force” in the form of Russia and China, both repressive regimes. As such, they have little in common with SA’s constitutional values.

This framework extends to some interpretations of the Brics partnership, with some believing it to be a global geopolitical bloc designed to overturn the hegemony of the West. It is nothing of the sort. China has the third largest voting bloc in the World Bank behind the US and Japan.

The World Bank’s capital base dwarfs anything the Brics can ever come up with, and the Chinese simply don’t see Brics as competition to the World Bank at all. Only SA’s fantasists do.

While the governing party’s mandarins continue to hope for the day the “West” is “defeated”, its apparent ideological and geopolitical enemies continue to be among its largest trading partners. Cultural ties are even deeper between the US, UK and SA — in essence meaning that there are deeper relationships between the peoples of SA and the Western countries than there are with Russia. Even China is doing better on this score.

The contradictions get weirder. It is a measure of the ANC’s confusion that it finds itself in the same quarter of opinion as US white supremacists who are among Putin’s biggest fans. It is also in lockstep with Tucker Carlson, a white nationalist Fox News anchor who often gushes about Putin. Not so long ago, Carlson ran a piece in which SA was accused of white genocide.

For an organisation that likes to trumpet its theoretical leftist credentials, there is decidedly nothing leftist about Putin’s Russia, and he doesn’t even pretend there is. Instead, for the last decade he has been the poster boy of white supremacist groups across Europe and the US, which explains why the ANC finds itself in the same box as a Fox News host.

Even if we assume SA’s position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine was informed by some agreement within Brics, that fell apart the moment Brazil voted to condemn the Russia at the UN general assembly. In any event, any belief that there are any ideological similarities between Brazil’s Ppresident Jair Bolsonaro and the ANC is also misplaced. Bolsonaro is as rabid a right-wing populist as you will find in any democracy.

SA’s position is devoid of principle. Having spent decades persuading prominent people and governments not to sit on the fence and condemn apartheid and take steps (such as sanctions) to end it, it is now equivocating. SA’s behaviour belies how the ANC sees itself on the global stage, a client state of some historical or ideological big brother nation to which it must tether its interests.

But foreign policy does not work like that. It is driven by both principle and interests in equal measure. Germany’s longstanding reluctance to take tougher measures against Putin was informed by its reliance on Russian oil and gas imports, for instance.

In contrast, Sweden’s support for SA’s liberation struggle was premised on principle. That commitment to principle informed Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s condemnation of Russia on February 24.

“Sweden condemns in the strongest terms Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s acts are also an attack on the European security order. It will be met by a united and robust response in solidarity with Ukraine. Russia alone is responsible for human suffering”, said her statement.

Kenya spoke with intellectual and moral clarity too, calling Russia’s invasion a “hankering for the days of empire”. And it is.

SA’s position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine points to a leadership with a poor, naive and backward understanding of global dynamics. It is also morally bankrupt, for even in its confusion it should be able to identify right and wrong. Sophisticated foreign policy involves a careful balance, however imperfect and it often is, between interests and principle.

We should also not measure our position based on what the “West” does or does not want. There is no more perfect demonstration of moral bankruptcy than that.

The time has come for a new, modernised leadership whose interpretation of the world in which SA has to prosper is grounded in present reality, SA’s constitutional values and sovereign interests. Our position on this matter demonstrates the extent to which a broken ANC continues to play a determinative role in more ways than one, to the potential peril of us all.