President Cyril Ramaphosa took his Flying Circus to eastern Europe last week — with senior conjurer Wally Rhoode taking (it) up the rear in Poland — seeking to end the Russia-Ukraine war. The escapade had the feel of a lost chapter of Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall. A vainglorious quest whose goal seems to have been to settle the costly fallout with the West from the Lady R debacle. To get back onside.
As the weekend unfolded, Ramaphosa must have wished he was back in the Anglo American boardroom doing something that came naturally, like negotiating mineworkers’ wages, or fly-fishing with Roelf Meyer, or selling buffaloes, rather than tangling with the grumpy men of war who hosted him.
He took it in his stride (as he does all things), venturing without Rhoode into Kyiv on the same day his friend without obvious benefits, Russian president Vladimir Putin, fired six Kalibr (battle-tested in Syria) and six Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missiles into the Ukrainian capital his troops were meant to have overpowered in a few short weeks last year.
Spokesperson Vincent Magwenya joined the circus in Kyiv, walking the tightrope of truth with his statement: “It's very strange that we didn't hear or see an explosion … There's obviously some deliberate misinformation being spread here. People are going on about their day.” With the war more than a year old now, Ukrainians would be odd people if they hadn't learnt to "go about their day", much as we do with load-shedding, crime and an ANC government.
Ramaphosa and fellow African leaders happened to be in Bucha at the time the missiles were shot down, lighting a candle for Ukrainians killed in a town whose fate has become a byword for Putin’s savagery. These are the people conveniently disregarded by those who claim to view the war through the comforting prism of impersonal tectonic shifts in geopolitics, disregarding the victims of a patent outrage.
With the war more than a year old now, Ukrainians would be odd people if they hadn't learnt to 'go about their day', much as we do with load-shedding, crime and an ANC government.
International relations minister Naledi Pandor was the picture of mirth alongside Sergey Lavrov, Putin’s glacé foreign minister, on his recent visit to South Africa. Our government’s principles are not up for sale for any trade deal, she said, even though our instincts tend to favour states that purposely undercut principles understood in the normal sense of the word in pursuit of “national interest”.
“Resource nationalism”, enacted with ruthless self-interest in mind, has become a convenient refuge for the despots we seem to admire, such as Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, China’s Xi Jinping and Putin, to name a few. They lord over countries that plunder their own resources and/or people and hypocritically proselytise for a world order that will not be “dominated” by the US and Nato countries.
And we must believe these most authoritarian and heartless dictatorships will miraculously usher in a new world order of peace and benevolence? And leopards with stripes?
Putin got many (including the ANC) to accept his war is being waged because he feels hemmed in by free countries, which is obviously anathema to a deep-seated Russian imperial and colonial instinct, but something we nonetheless persuaded ourselves chimes with our anticolonial “principles”.
Lately, he has changed emphasis, arguing it was the “coup” in Kyiv in 2014 that installed a government hostile to people of Russian heritage and background, a bit like Hitler’s claim when he occupied the Sudetenland to “protect” ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Putin is battling to “control the narrative”, as they say in the propaganda racket. Possibly to counter the failure of his mostly disbelieved official media, he recently sat down with war bloggers whose reports are generally seen to be credible. Gleeful commentary noted the awkward encounter between the 70-year-old dictator and his interlocutors, one of them wearing a baseball cap backwards. In one clip, Putin discussed the need for better weapons-guidance systems as casually as if he were showing youngsters an aileron setting on a model airplane.
Being a despot of the elected variety, Putin is man of the people and expert on all things. On the day before the Flying Circus hit town, he told an economics forum he had “a lot of Jewish friends” who told him “Zelensky is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people”. On such bar-room baiting is the fate of nations decided, with Ukraine under a Jewish leader being “de-Nazified” by Putin.
When Ramaphosa emerged for a press briefing with Ukraine's Volodomyr Zelensky, with a lecture on the “meaning of Mandela” thrown in, his stony profile resembled a fifth president on America’s Mount Rushmore.
Full marks to Ramaphosa for using the word 'war' and raising the fate of kidnapped children. Putin is not accustomed to such effrontery.
If he was looking forward to meeting a kindred spirit in Putin, he must have been disappointed. Full marks to Ramaphosa for using the word “war” and raising the fate of kidnapped children. Putin is not accustomed to such effrontery.
He sat through Ramaphosa’s presentation before interrupting to correct the impression that children had suffered in his pointless war, to proclaim that he was the protector of the children. Maybe he should tell that to the International Criminal Court.
After Putin’s tirade, a rude interruption indeed if he were not the emperor, the live feed to the event was apparently cut, without explanation. Who else is worth listening to once the oracle has spoken?
The DA’s John Steenhuisen has complained about the cost of the Flying Circus, but who can doubt our word now that we’re nonaligned? A small price to pay if it works. No more awkward silences and questions with visiting European leaders. Pandor will no doubt have been instructed to find US secretary of state Antony Blinken at least half as amusing as Lavrov in future.
All it took was a weekend of abject humiliation and haranguing by two leaders fixated on their war. And a cunning ploy to keep Rhoode locked up and out of harm's way on an SAA charter lease-jet in Poland, chiding officious Poles about racism. This after having circled around the Mediterranean for hours trying to get flight clearance. Mayday, innocents on board!
Chicken or beef, anyone? Molotov cocktail, perhaps?
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