GHALEB CACHALIA: ANC’s harmful Russia and China flirtation has deep psychological roots

Big business is beginning to speak up against the ANC government’s dalliance with Russia, with FirstRand CEO Alan Pullinger calling it “despicable” and “catastrophic” for the local economy (“SA’s Russia dalliance poses ‘catastrophic risk’, says FirstRand CEO”, March 20). The background to this government’s incomprehensible stance is worth examination.

With the effective demise of global socialism, let alone Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is often inexplicable to many that the ANC clings to the coattails of China, Russia and Cuba when it would make more sense to align with Singapore or South Korea. After all, its policies — much rhetoric aside — are essentially in tune with a mixed economic view predicated on the broad precepts of a developmental state that tries to balance economic growth and social development.

The problem is that both the Singapore and South Korea success stories are firmly allied to the Western camp, and any alliance with that grouping is simply out of the question for the ANC, for a number of reasons. The rhetoric is perplexingly red and odd, especially as the hue of the Chinese flag is actually a deep pink nowadays and not as red as people think, to coin a phrase. The Russian model is based on an oligarchic kleptocracy, and the Cuban offering evinces a penniless romanticism that makes for even less sense from a rational economic point of view.

Then again, the world, much like the relationships between individuals, doesn’t turn on economics only. It goes deeper, plumbing the depths of the psychology of perceived inferiority on the one hand and ostensible acceptance as an equal of sorts on the other. The red troika offers comfortingly welcoming arms of comrades who apparently don’t judge and have a history of solidarity, when the West evinced no such warmth while they were squaring up to the forces of global communism in the chill of the Cold War.

Without context

Since the collapse of communism even US foreign policy has been at sea; things aren’t what they used to be and decisions on individual issues are often ad hoc and without context. SA is no different in that regard. It matters not to the ANC that the Russians and the Chinese are probably more racist in reality towards Africans behind the scenes — ask any African student who has studied in either country. Even in “raceless” Cuba those who raise the issue of race often find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Semiclandestine Cuban rap groups oppose this form of censorship — as the hip-hop group Hermanos de Causa sings, “Don’t you tell me that there isn’t any [racism], because I have seen it/ don’t tell me that it doesn’t exist, because I have lived it.”

Cold War-driven historical solidarity apart, there is a comforting belief, rooted in the psychological makeup of the ANC and its fellow travellers — despite the racial attitudes referred to — that the Chinese, Russians and Cubans don’t sneer at Africans because they were not initiators of the enlightenment, progenitors of liberal democracy and owners of mother tongues that have a universal appeal in literature, science and the parlance of politics — nurtured in the manicured quads of the rarefied enclosures of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and the like.

They might be prejudiced, but they didn’t share the white man’s burden of earlier West European colonialists to civilise and educate. They didn’t shove Confucian values down your throat or choke you with incense — a liturgical implement often considered distinctive to the Russian Orthodox faith — in a quest to convert the heathen natives.

Crush us

As such, a degree of comfort in relations with the new Chinese and Russian neocolonialists exists as they provide much-needed help to a new ANC kleptocratic class, even if it comes at a price — in this instance, infinitely more costly than the Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci trappings of crass consumerism that define the ANC, EFF and others. It reflects the realpolitik of the present economic and political interlocutors and is underscored by a rose-tinted version of solidarity that refuses to understand that they were merely pawns in a war of yore. It also serves to alleviate feelings of being lorded over.

What seems to be lost on the ANC and many who vote for it as well as the EFF and others of that ilk, is the attitude one of their heroes, Stalin, demonstrated in his last throw of desperation, masked as a bold bid by the audacious, when he said: “We are 50 or 100 years behind the most advanced nations; either we make good this gap in 10 years or they crush us.”

Whatever the reasons for the retardation, and there are many — endogenous and exogenous, colonialism, apartheid, an isolation from the industrial revolution and more — the gap can be closed. But that requires honest and diligent application, a degree of self-actualisation, introspection and a wariness of who your friends are or appear to be.

Steve Biko and his struggle veteran friend Peter Jones, who died earlier this year — both leaders of the Black People’s Convention — would have understood this. As Biko said: “For black people to work out a programme they need to defeat the one main element in politics which is working against them, and that is the psychological feeling of inferiority.”

The ANC would be wise to take a leaf out of Biko’s book, but sadly the false trappings of personal and cadre enrichment stand in the way and are embedded in the warped psyche of many — imagining that well-heeled equals well-grounded. Alas, that is just not the case.

• Cachalia, an MP, is DA public enterprises spokesperson.