EDITORIAL: Putting the nation into national interest

For years now, our foreign policy has been drifting in the wrong direction. Our national interests have been conflated with the interests of the governing ANC.

Last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa rolled out the red carpet at the Union Buildings as he hosted Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, Uganda’s president, on a state visit. This came just days after the shameful naval exercises with the Russian military, now committing war crimes in Ukraine, and just a month after the visit by Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister.

This follows a trend and comes years after the ANC instructed its government deployees to downgrade our diplomatic relations with Israel over the dispute with Palestine. Years earlier, under Nelson Mandela, SA switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to mainland China over past loyalties.

Under the ANC’s rule, our government has turned its back on our major trading partners in favour of traditional ANC allies such as China and Russia.

Even more concerning, our government turned a blind eye to closer territories. We looked on as election after election was stolen in Zimbabwe.  We mollycoddled Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s strongman, as he continued roughing up his political opponents, including by hounding them out of the country.

For years, the government advocated “quiet diplomacy” with Harare, supposedly speaking truth to Robert Mugabe behind closed doors while supporting him in public. Almost two decades later, there is no credible evidence of the efficacy of that policy. Ramaphosa, who styles himself as Mandela’s protégé, is now a staunch advocate of scrapping sanctions against Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s successor and one of the dictator’s key enforcers.

When Lavrov was in Pretoria there was no sign that our government communicated its displeasure at the continued violation of Ukraine. Equally, there is no sign that our government, on South Africans’ behalf, told Museveni that we disapprove of his treatment of his political opponents, or his fellow Ugandans who happen to be gay.

In August, Pretoria will host the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA) summit. Again, we have no sign that our discontent about the invasion of Ukraine will be discussed. That summit might admit Saudi Arabia as another member, glossing over the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.

We cite these cases for one reason: our foreign policy has lost its way. Put differently, what is fundamentally wrong is positioning the ANC’s interests as being the same as SA’s. The two are distinctly different.

SA is a reasonably new democracy, but the government’s failure to discern a difference between national and party interests makes us seem amateurish in the world of nations. Party-to-party solidarity is not the same as people-to-people solidarity.

Mature democracies do not change foreign policy radically according to party lines. Foreign policy is determined by national interest.

This decades-long drift of our foreign policy should stop. What is good for the ANC, or any ruling party, can never be assumed to be in SA’s interest. Despite its many faults and its oppressive history in Africa, the West’s stance to make apartheid SA economically unviable in the 1980s is an example of what national interest looks like in practice.