LETTER: SA shows its irrelevance again

The world is experiencing seismic events, not least the US’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. In this situation SA is at best irrelevant, at worst on the wrong side in the struggle between the great powers.   

SA’s irrelevance was demonstrated at the Kananaskis, Canada, Group of 7 (G7) summit, where President Cyril Ramaphosa contributed nothing new. He arrived with his usual shopping list: a fairer, more inclusive world order; sustainable development; and climate change financing linked to SA’s just energy transition.  

Yet Ramaphosa, Jacob Zuma’s former deputy president, is badly placed to advocate sustainable development. In SA, the ANC has stifled development by impoverishing and wrecking the country through state capture, cadre development — which overlaps with the former — through race-based laws that hold back growth and employment, and by clinging to outdated undemocratic ideology. The neo-Stalinist National Health Insurance comes to mind.  

Ramaphosa did bring up critical minerals, his carrot for tempting Donald Trump to not punish SA for its anti-US foreign policy. However, the two never met because Trump left the G7 early.   

This was just as well, for Ramaphosa’s ham-fisted attempts to reaffirm SA’s foreign policy independence — that is the alliances with Russia and China, membership of the anti-West and increasingly dysfunctional Brics, and worst of all the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice coupled with the links to Iran and Hamas — would not have gone down well with Trump. 

The fact is Pretoria did not “recheck its notes” from Ramaphosa’s May 21 meeting with Trump, as suggested by Business Day (“SA should take steps to avoid the walk of shame,” June 18). Instead, the ANC doubled down on “sovereignty” issues and announced further discriminatory measures to regulate economic activity. 

The world is increasingly fractured. SA will fare better if the ANC reverts to good governance and a genuinely nonaligned foreign policy.  

François Theron 
Pretoria     

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