SA's foreign policy is understood, and the megaphone is the medium of choice

News24

08-05-2025

What is unfolding in the deteriorating relationship between the United States and South Africa has been years in the making, and is a logical outcome of South Africa's foreign projection, writes Terence Corrigan.
Rarely for South Africa, foreign policy has entered mainstream political debate. The issue is, of course, the relationship with the United States, now at a historic low point (possibly the lowest ever).
Much of the focus on this has been on the posture of the US: on the temperament of its president, his abrasiveness towards friends and opponents alike, his loose relationship with truth, and his use of social media to communicate weighty decisions.
Insufficient attention has been given to the manner in which South African diplomacy has contributed to creating this situation, and whether the mooted response holds any hope of dealing with it.
The latter seems to involve sending representatives to the US to set its administration right on South Africa. To 'explain'. And to do so in a calm and measured manner – as now former ambassador to the US Ebrahim Rasool put it, South Africa needed to put away the megaphone. (Returning for the US after his expulsion, he turned to a literal megaphone in full street populist mode – there was something richly symbolic about the sight.)
Still the notion that mannerisms and clarifications are the key to resolving the diplomatic breakdown misses the point. What is unfolding has been years in the making, and is a logical outcome of South Africa's foreign projection.
Deeply ideological
Protestations aside, South Africa is not 'non-aligned'. Its view of the world is deeply ideological and both the state and the ANC have fancied themselves as representative of the Global South, marching alongside Russia and China, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, fearlessly challenging the hegemonic order and evincing an often visceral (and seldom concealed) hostility towards those whom it regards as exercising that hegemony. Foremost here, of course, has been the US.
For a flavour of this, see the ANC's 55th National Conference Resolutions, specifically its comments on Russia's invasion of Ukraine: 'The US provoked the war with Russia over Ukraine, hoping to put Russia in its place. The peace and 'free market economy' dividends promised at the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s have been shattered. The Western imperialist dominance over Eastern Europe is being advanced not through free trade and open competition for markets, but through US-led expansionist military strategies.'
This is part of a long-running trend. The US was plotting 'regime change'. It might even invade. It was afflicted by racism. President Ramaphosa and the ANC expressed themselves supportively on the Black Lives Matter movement – concerns for African-American victims of police action in the US being regarded with more visible concern that those abused by South Africa's security forces under its own lockdown. (By contrast, the crushing of Hong Kong's democracy movement, the mass internment of Uighurs, political dissidents in Cuba, and the status of homosexuals or religious minorities in Iran has merited nary a whisper.)
Dependence on American goodwill
Indeed, former ambassador to the United Nations Dumisani Kumalo once described a 'cold war' between the 'North' and 'South' when human rights questions arose. In common with its peers in the Global South, South Africa was 'forced to rally to the support of the targeted country, irrespective of its actual human rights performance'.
Paradoxically, it held these stances quite publicly while depending on American goodwill for trade privileges and development assistance.
The growing strain that this was causing had been apparent for years, the probable consequences clear long before Trump's second victory.
In mid-2023, in the wake of the Lady R incident, a bipartisan group of US legislators called out South Africa for its foreign policy, and questioned its eligibility for continued preferential trade access. This should have raised a timeous alarm for South Africa.
READ | Eduard Jordaan: South Africa's diplomatic challenges in the era of Trump
But the country's foreign missions have been used as prestigious sinecures for political grandees. In this, the diplomatic service mirrors what has gone wrong in the South African state apparatus as a whole.
Aptitude, professionalism and good management have not been priorities in the conduct of its public affairs, at home or abroad. The National Development Plan expressed concern about the state of the country's foreign representation, and over the years a steady drip of worrying reports has served to highlight the reality of this problem.
During the Lady R controversy, the Daily Maverick ran a piece about the state of the mission in Washington. The ambassador, former Cape Town mayor Nomaindiya Mfeketo (whose public service had hardly been a litany of glory), was absent on prolonged sick leave. 'South Africa,' the report commented, 'has no lobbyists in the US to proactively and consistently go out to represent its interests and explain itself, no regular interaction with Congress and virtually no pushback when unfriendly articles appear in the press.'
This is not unique to the representation in the US. News24 recently ran a piece on the state of South Africa's Asian missions (with one likened to a 'child-headed household'), while a later report noted that the country had no trade counsellors anywhere.
Or, as Emeritus Professor at the University of Pretoria (and former ambassador) Gerrit Olivier has written:
Ideologues simply took over the top echelon of the foreign policy establishment and packed it with economically illiterate generalists and mostly redundant ANC 'deployed ambassadors', leaving the country with a dysfunctional foreign service and neither fish nor fowl foreign policy for the past decade.
So, South Africa's actions have served to alienate the US (and to lose standing and forgo opportunities elsewhere too), without the capacity to contain the fallout. By all accounts, South Africa's diplomatic representatives have not excelled at skilful backroom diplomacy, developing the influence in interlocutor countries or in fostering the global alliances (BRICS+ seems to mean much more to South Africa than to its fellow members…) that could manage the consequences of its posture.
This should prompt some introspection. Those blaming Solidarity, AfriForum and 'misinformation' for the impasse in the relationship (not entirely accurate, but apparently a comforting narrative) should ask what South Africa's representatives had been doing, or failing to do – over many years – to allow such an opening to develop.
And those crying foul that South Africa is being targeted for its ICJ case on Israel while countries like Ireland, Spain and Malaysia are not, might bear in mind that each of them can draw on carefully cultivated leverage of their own, where South Africa has failed to build an equivalent for itself.
None of this can be blamed on Trump, nor even on the US. South Africa's messaging has been clear, the megaphone − literal and figurative – is the preferred tool to communicate it.
As Rasool had wisely acknowledged there is a 'need to completely recalibrate'. It's an open question whether South Africa's brand of diplomacy makes this possible. Ideology and incapacity are a fatal combination.
- Terence Corrigan is projects and publications manager at the Institute of Race Relations
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