While South Africa faces xenophobic blowback from its African neighbours, the ANC’s Nomvula Mokonyane spent Africa Day in Moscow – a telling snapshot of a party whose foreign policy is mired in Cold War nostalgia, writes Tony Leon. Nomvula Mokonyane, ANC deputy secretary-general, fronts the party’s foreign policy and heads its international engagements. This week on [...]
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 [...]
Israel’s journey from David Ben-Gurion’s founding vision of being a “light to the nations” to Itamar Ben-Gvir’s controversial death penalty bill targeting Palestinians has sparked unprecedented opposition from Jewish diaspora communities who fear the country’s democratic foundations are being eroded by extremist politics, writes Tony Leon. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the State of [...]
As the Iran conflict threatens to derail South Africa’s optimistic budget assumptions, the country’s “parasitic state” will once again finds a convenient external excuse for SA’s internal failures, writes Tony Leon. South Africa, along with the world, now confronts a vastly reshaped and malign economic outlook, untethered to previous assumptions etched as recently as the benign [...]
The death of scenario planner Clem Sunter prompts Tony Leon to reflect on how South Africa has abandoned strategic thinking for ideological rigidity, backing Iran’s murderous regime while the “Big Gorilla” United States reminds the world where real power lies. Clem Sunter, who died last month, was rightly memorialised as a pioneering thinker who elevated the hopes [...]
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 [...]
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), [...]
Former president Thabo Mbeki’s lecture on historical materialism to KZN ANC comrades reveals a farcical ideological battle between the ANC and SACP over revolutionary labels, while real crises like mass job losses go unaddressed - echoing the dangerous political delusions and echo chambers that Scott Anderson’s new book shows led to Iran’s catastrophic 1979 revolution, [...]
