Tony Leon examines how newly appointed South African ambassador Roelf Meyer faces the near-impossible task of reconciling South Africa’s racial transformation policies with Donald Trump’s administration’s fierce opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. Consequences will follow the appointment of Roelf Meyer by President Cyril Ramaphosa as SA ambassador to the US. Though one of them [...]
While R1.5 trillion has been promised at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s investment conference, South Africa’s actual capital formation has plummeted from 20 to 14% of GDP, suggesting that real investment – like Natie Kirsh’s R500 billion business empire built in America – requires genuine structural reforms and competitive markets, not just pledges, writes Tony Leon. “Cyril loves [...]
Drawing on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos call for nations to stop “living the lie,” Tony Leon reflects on South Africa’s contradictions between sovereignty rhetoric and reality – from outsourcing naval exercises to China while claiming independence, to sliding from the world’s top gold producer to 12th place despite record prices. Last year, on a [...]
Tony Leon traces a line from the Berlin Wall to Simon’s Town, arguing that South Africa’s choices now side with repression over freedom – risking trade, investment and diplomatic fallout. My late parliamentary colleague Harry Schwarz had a gift for explaining complexity in understandable terms. Many decades after his arrival in 1934 in South Africa [...]
With the rules-based order in retreat, Tony Leon argues SA’s hard-won impeccable moral authority has been squandered once too often. Just as well, given the extraordinary, arguably extra-legal, events over the weekend in Caracas, that South Africa’s ambassador to Venezuela, Lindiwe Maeko, maintained a judicious silence (thus far). Had her predecessor, Ambassador Joseph Nkosi (now in Chad), [...]
While President Ramaphosa touts G20 success and foreign policy achievements, he should keep in mind that voters overwhelmingly prioritise domestic economic concerns like jobs and corruption over international relations, writes Tony Leon. “There are few votes in foreign affairs,” was the response I received from a local politician. This, after I enquired why his party had [...]
Tony Leon argues that South Africa’s G20 summit was inflated as a historic diplomatic triumph when it was merely standard international theatre with vague aspirations. In July 1971, US National Security Advisor Dr Henry Kissinger undertook a top-secret visit to Beijing, breaking more than two decades of Cold War confrontation between America and China. It was [...]
From Reagan’s Hollywood charm to Nixon’s strategic depth, America’s most effective presidents surrounded themselves with brilliant advisors - a lesson Paul Mashatile, the likely next ANC president, would do well to heed as his party’s grip on national power continues to weaken, writes Tony Leon. Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, who served [...]
South Africa’s moral blindness, or one-eyed approach to a the 7 October attack, might be one reason for the country’s exclusion from a seat at Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday, writes Tony Leon. Why, you might reasonably ask, was the world’s “moral superpower” not present at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt on Monday? Just to recap: In January [...]
It is not easy or comfortable dealing with the mercurial US administration, but as the fate of lot of communities in many places in SA will soon realise, it is an obvious necessity, writes Tony Leon. The South African government can, with honour, award itself an OBE – in this case, diplomatic shorthand for “overtaken by [...]
