British statesman Roy Jenkins wrote of the life and career of French soldier-leader Charles de Gaulle that “compared with his companions on the world stage [De Gaulle] had mostly to play a poor hand from a weak seat”, adding that “he behaved in a way which, seeking grandeur, invited ridicule, yet always escaped it. He was a frog that puffed itself up but instead of bursting became almost as big as it wanted to be”.
More than 50 years after De Gaulle’s death his political shadow and strategic architecture still shade France and Europe, no mean accomplishment for someone who — from the obscurity of his prior deputy ministry, by his own will and sense of ingrained grandeur — set himself up in exile in London in 1940 as the leader of the Free French. After the war he managed to insert France — defeated and occupied for most of the war by the Nazis — into the very centre of European and world affairs, a place it still occupies today.
On the subject of “poor hands played from weak seats”, and in the lengthening shadow of the sanctioned Russian ship Lady R’s midnight sonata in Simon’s Town, a less complimentary take surfaced on the hapless President Cyril Ramaphosa’s card-playing skills (or lack thereof).
The day after US ambassador Reuben Brigety detonated his diplomatic thermonuclear explosion over the bilateral relationship with SA with his claim that the Lady R onboarded armaments for Russia, local advertising maven Mike Abel offered his take, tweeting: “There is nothing more foolish than playing a game of poker, failing to notice there is a mirror behind you and your opponent can see you are bluffing and have no hand to play. But the most foolish is the player that knows there is a mirror, knows they have a dud hand, and still thinks they can bluff. There is absolutely no chance of ever winning under these circumstances, or even getting invited back to play.”
SA’s weak seat, mostly arranged by its government’s malperformance on all fronts, was underscored late last week by a former Ramaphosa cheerleader, the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman. He offered the twitterati a more concise take: “Comic that the ANC is offering to mediate a peace settlement [between Russia and Ukraine]. Maybe get the lights on in SA first.”
Let’s just respool the current diplomatic crisis and how this government has played or misplayed its hand. The back story has been on offer since February 24 2022, the day Russia illegally and aggressively breached the sovereignty of Ukraine with a full-scale invasion, in breach of every precept and principle of public international law.
With one initial exception, SA has contorted itself not to recognise its own principles on sovereignty and self-determination, its ostensible abhorrence of imperial revanchism and its theoretical commitment to a rules-based international order. Russia was, on any basis, on the wrong side of these nostrums, and on every UN vote in defence of these principles. Yet SA declined to affirm its own affirmations, offering instead a nebulous neutrality and nonalignment.
But two events in December blew a gaping hole in the leaking ship of state. On December 6 the sanctioned Russian ship Lady R docks in Simon’s Town, its transponder switched off, and offloads unexplained munitions and onloads in the middle of the night, under armed guard, further unexplained cargo, then heads for a final destination of Novorossiysk, with a penultimate stop at Port Sudan.
So, if the mystery cargo was not for Russia, speculation mounts that perhaps it was intended for Russia’s Wagner mercenaries in the Sahel. Who knows? Apparently not Ramaphosa, the supreme commander of our armed forces, though he has had five months to find out. Caught flatfooted last week, he kicked for his normal touch with the announcement of yet another judicial commission to ascertain what perhaps two phone calls could reveal.
Or are we into a reprise of the Gupta jet Waterkloof landing, and some middle management official will be fingered for the offence, wrist-tapped and then sent to a cushy assignment far from these shores?
The other December event, 10 days after the Lady R berthed, was at Nasrec in Johannesburg, where among other tasks at its party conference the ANC faithful could vent their spleen at the hateful West and join the circus of condemnation of the US, which in the fantasy world of the comrades and the hall of mirrors they occupy, it was American foreign policy that was to blame for the invasion of Ukraine.
Doubling down on the Kremlin’s script last weekend, ANC foreign policy head Obed Bapela offered the spectacular non sequitur that “the ANC position on the US was not new and the ANC has always been anticolonial”. The fact that Russia is attempting to recreate the Soviet empire at the expense of a country that does not want to be annexed seems to be beyond his comprehension.
As is the damage done to the R400bn relationship with the US through SA’s naval exercises with Russia and China in February. Then came the disinvitation of SA, for the first time in decades, from the Group of Seven gathering in Japan, hot on the heels of our invitation to indicted international war criminal Vladimir Putin to visit here in August.
When it finally dawned on the government that it’s hard to be “the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral”, Pretoria sent a diplomatic rescue mission to Washington DC two weeks ago to do some damage limitation. Two members of the US Congress who met the delegation left the meeting with impressions vastly different from their assertion that the US provided no proof of its assertions that SA was assisting Russia in its war effort.
US Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen told the New York Times that the SA delegation “indicated they understood the gravity of our concerns regarding their increased military ties with Russia and were taking seriously the evidence we presented regarding transfer of weapons and ammunition to Russia”. The senior Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee, senator Jim Risch, went even further after the visit, calling on US president Joe Biden to “re-evaluate the scope and scale of current engagement with SA’s government”.
As we limp onwards and backwards, the best defence from our department of international relations & co-operation is that the US ambassador did not follow protocols. When your most important unilateral trade preference agreement (the African Growth & Opportunity Act) — and the thousands of local jobs it has gifted us — is at stake, this indeed is “the bluff of fools”, to quote Abel.
• Leon, a former leader of the opposition, now chairs a communications company.
