US President Ronald Reagan is attributed as once wisely noting that: “Politics is simple yet hard to do.”
Even more so in the international arena, as South Africa’s contortions in the United States on the bilateral relationship revealed. Last week, International Relations Minister Naledi Pandor was in the news for two apparently related reasons.
Domestically, she was touted as the ANC’s premier ace – in a very thin deck if it is true – to snatch a provincial victory for the party in the Western Cape.
However improbable – last time it finished second with just 28% of the vote – Pandor is touted as the get-out-of-relegation card because it is thought, by party leaders, she will “swing” the Muslim vote in the province due to her implacable anti-Israel stance.
Another major party in the province informally advises that its internal polling suggests that only around 10% of Western Cape Muslims regard Gaza as the hinge issue for their votes.
Class interests are more determinative of voting preferences than other concerns
But you don’t need an opinion poll to confirm what Karl Marx determined long before modern polling began: class interests are more determinative of voting preferences than other concerns. And in the Western Cape and the country at large, ethnic identity politics often trumps religion in preferencing voter choice.
Anyway, the entire issue might be moot since the electoral lists are closed and Pandor does not feature on the ANC provincial list at all. Her placement on the party national list, despite the hype around her in ANC circles, is a very modest 86th out of 200.
Interestingly, this is some 11 places behind former premier Ebrahim Rasool, who last held elective office in 2010 (in 2019, he was elected again to the Western Cape legislature but promptly resigned before he was sworn in).
Pandor’s day job, representing South Africa in the world, saw her visit Washington DC last week to shore up relations with the world’s number one power and the country’s second-largest trading partner. And this certainly generated news, not just locally but in the US.
The Wall Street Journal, both impeccably Republican and vehemently anti the MAGA-capture of the party by presidential nominee Donald Trump, was unimpressed. On Monday, it editorialised on her visit under the headline: “South Africa joins the anti-U.S. axis”.
It cited in its bill of indictment:
The Journal notes that “the US needs friends around the world and must do business with imperfect regimes. But South Africa has been moving toward the anti-US axis for some time.”
It was also dismissive that morality or a newfound sense of international righteousness, impelled the ICJ action against Israel: “[It] was a hostile act against a US ally choreographed to distract attention at home from power outages, price increases, and other domestic failures”.
The lack of consistency on policing international law and its violators even drew comment from the Journal’s ideological opposite, the New York Times, which, in an earlier and less hostile article on our foreign positioning, by John Eligon on January 12, noted: “South Africa’s efforts to oppose the West have sometimes faced intense criticism. South African officials refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine [and, he could have added, refused to call it by its name], drawing accusations that they had taken the side of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a close ally, in the war”.
A congratulatory message to Putin
Well, never mind SA’s “refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion”, on Human Rights Day nogal, Cyril Ramaphosa sent a congratulatory message of support to Putin on his “re-election” as President after 24 years in office, unbothered at all by the entirely sham nature of the poll and the killing in prison just weeks before of his Putin’s number one opponent, Alexei Navalny.
Pandor’s US visit was timed to coincide with the US House of Representatives vote last week not that, except in a negative sense, her presence had any effect on the foreign affairs committee’s outcome. By a hefty bipartisan margin (36-13), it enacted the US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act, noting SA’s “history of siding with malign actors”.
It now moves to the House for a vote, where the outcome will reflect the committee’s decision. What happens in the almost evenly split Senate afterwards is uncertain. Not that the US is a slouch when it comes to such siding, but the fact that the bitterly divided hyper-partisan House, which requires emergency measures to stop a government shutdown down could, at the vital committee stage, so easily legislate against SA, tells its own story. Or as the Journal expressed it, the benefit from the “Mandela halo effect” has been squandered by today’s rulers and “Congress is right to put Pretoria on notice”.
Quite how comprehensively the “Mandela halo effect” has dimmed was reflected in a separate analysis by emerging market guru, Ruchir Sharma. His 2012 best-selling book “Breakout Nations” identified the countries “likely to flourish or disappoint” in the era of diverging economic growth.
Back then, South Africa got quite a lot of space in his analysis, though in the “disappointing” category, with the author expressing its then estimated long-term GDP growth rate of 2% “as the most disappointing for any emerging market in recent times”.
That modest estimate proved to be generous – a decade-plus later we have crashed to around 0.5% GDP growth in 2023. Little wonder when Sharma, this week in the Financial Times, listed the countries which were once the weakest links in the global economy but are now carrying out radical reforms and are “mending”, South Africa, despite the promise of a reformist new dawn, didn’t make the cut.
Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya from Africa made the list, alongside Turkey and Argentina. But we went unmentioned.
Back in Congress, it was noteworthy that on the Republican side, the prime mover behind the legislation was an African American congressman, John James, who chairs the committee.
Writing this week, on News24, Philip de Wet commented that James’ race “shows that at least one part of South Africa’s approach towards the US is, like much of its foreign policy, misguided”.
This in reference to Pandor’s instruction to her diplomats stationed in Washington to “devote more effort to reaching out to African Americans”.
US politics racially realigning
Perhaps Pandor, also doesn’t read the polls much like her party comrades. One of the key reasons for the distinct possibility of defeat of Joe Biden in November, and the second presidency of Donald Trump is the change of sentiment among minority voters, especially African Americans.
As John Burn-Murdoch wrote recently in the Financial Times (he is their chief data reporter): “American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment” and stated that “this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today and one of the most poorly understood.”
Indeed, in the data in the most recent New York Times poll, Biden leads Trump among black voters by less than 10 points, a group he won by almost 50 points in 2020.
Pandor obviously never got that memo. Just as she, a new international rights activist but long-committed feminist, never got the memo on Iran.
SA’s close ally in Tehran has a clear and bloodstained record on both human rights in general and actions against women in particular. In September 2022, a young woman Mahsa Jina Amini was killed by Iran’s morality police. When the country was engulfed in a cascade of protests in response and rallied against the mandatory wearing of the hijab, the reaction of the regime was both predictable and brutal.
As Sanam Vakil, of Chatham House think tank, described this on the weekend: “Communication blackouts, and heightened surveillance followed. Thousand were arrested, detained, and tortured, many were maimed and attacked, more than 550 people were killed, young schoolgirls were hospitalised from exposure to toxic gas attacks and at least eight people were executed, and many sentenced to long prison terms. A UN-fact-finding mission recently concluded that the crimes uncovered indeed amount to “crimes against humanity”.
Pandor had no hesitation on disputed evidence and the legal interpretations of it, logging and labelling Israel’s war in Gaza as “a genocide”. Not a word she ever applies to Hamas incidentally. By contrast, last week, she had a smug and evasive answer when questioned in Washington on whether Iran was an “authoritarian regime”.
Iran’s attack and murder and repression of women was well chronicled more than 18 months ago. Yet in her reply, just days ago, Pandor said: “I don’t know whether they are an authoritarian regime… I don’t have that definition in my logbook”.
Ignorance? Indifference? Wilful blindness? Pick ‘n Mix – but any way, you view it, not a great look from a spartan logbook for a moralising international relations minister and putative premier candidate for the Western Cape.
