EDITORIAL: We need answers, not yet another inquiry

Ordinarily, it should take a few days for the government, especially the ministry of defence, to confirm whether a foreign vessel picked up or delivered illegal cargo. However, in SA’s case it requires a judicial commission of inquiry to establish facts about this simple issue.

The Lady R, the Russian vessel, made a stop at Simon’s Town last December, and yet the government has offered no satisfactory answers as to what the ship delivered and collected. Explanations by the defence ministry have failed to quash allegations that the vessel collected arms for the beleaguered Russian army in its war against Ukraine.

For months, allegations that the ship left with weapons have been doing the rounds in SA and Western capitals. Instead of forthrightly addressing these claims, the government opted for obfuscation. It was only in the past month that it took the claims seriously. It dispatched a team of envoys led by Sydney Mufamadi, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s national security adviser, to Washington to address the Lady R debacle, among others.

Last Thursday, the government acted as though it was shocked and furious when Reuben Brigety, the US ambassador to SA, made similar claims in a media briefing. He was rebuked for not following diplomatic protocol to ventilate the claims. This past weekend he and his country were ridiculed and accused of bullying tactics by the governing ANC.

The claims are serious and, if true, they constitute a great betrayal of public trust by the government. Already, the government has denied that it authorised the sale of arms to Russia. This should be the end of it, and the president should publicly state this fact. But this has not happened.

Instead of rebutting the claims, he has chosen to buy himself time by appointing a commission of inquiry — to be chaired by a retired judge — to look into the veracity of the claims. And on Tuesday, to further divert attention from the arms claims, he announced that five countries, including SA, would meet Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, to mediate a peaceful end to the conflict.

This is a public relations exercise designed to shore up Pretoria’s aspiration to act as an honest broker in the conflict. Had this intervention occurred in 2022, before Lady R’s mysterious rendezvous in Simon’s Town, it might have warranted public support.

The cynicism that has greeted Africa’s mediation initiative is understandable. African leaders, who constantly talk about finding African solutions to their problems, have hitherto failed to silence guns in the Horn of Africa and Sudan, and now believe they can mediate a conflict in another continent. 

South Africans do not need another costly inquiry. They need answers — now — and not a protracted process that will in all likelihood be shrouded in secrecy given the nature of the subject matter. The issue at hand is quite simple: if Brigety’s claims are true, and if government did not load arms onto the Lady R, then who did? Did a rogue government agency or private party load weapons on the ship? If this happened, it suggests that the government is not in charge of its own assets.

It should concern all of us that our president’s word cannot be trusted as the final answer to this sordid saga.