The View from South Africa

March 12, 2003
By Greg Mills

South Africa appears to be on a diplomatic collision course with the United States.  

First, former president Nelson Mandela, speaking at the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in December 2002 said U.S. policy towards Iraq was arrogant and marked an alarming disregard for the United Nations. He later charged the United States with racism and said it had “a president who can’t think properly” who wanted to plunge the world into a “holocaust”.  Second, Pretoria has recently sent a number of ministerial missions to Baghdad, both to seek trade and investment opportunities and, more controversially still, to try to head off a war against Baghdad. Third, President Thabo Mbeki in late January lambasted those who threatened Iraq with war but did nothing about Israel’s nuclear weapons saying, “the matter has nothing to do with principle … it turns solely on the question of power [and] we disagree”.  Fourth, a day after Mbeki insisted his government was not anti-American, the ANC Secretary-General Kgalema Motlanthe told about 4,000 anti-war demonstrators outside the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria that South Africa, with its rich mineral resources, could be the next target of American action “if we don’t stop this unilateral action against Iraq today”. Earlier, following Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003, Smuts Ngonyama, the head of the presidency in the ANC, dismissed the evidence against Iraq as a “fabrication.”    

While the fight against AIDS and the worsening situation in Zimbabwe continue to top the United States policy list for Africa, these disagreements over Iraq have occurred against the backdrop of increasing signs of tension between Pretoria and Washington over Robert Mugabe’s misrule in Zimbabwe and Mbeki’s apparent reluctance to act against its northern neighbor, and the South African president’s eccentric views on the (non) link between HIV and AIDS.  

Yet South Africa and the United States share many interests, and there is a lot at stake. There is a burgeoning bilateral trade and investment relationship. The U.S. is the largest investor in South Africa since 1994, with a stake of more than $2.5 billion by the end of the decade. During the 1990s, bilateral trade grew by more than $2 billion, with over $6 billion in two-way business by 2000. Growth has been especially rapid in manufacturing goods and services. A United States-South Africa free trade area is now on the cards. With its economy accounting for 45% of the combined total of sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 states and its exemplary record of political reconciliation and stability, unsurprisingly South Africa was cited in the September 2002 National Security Strategy along with Ethiopia, Nigeria and Kenya as one of four pivotal states in Africa with which Washington would work in the war against terror. Finally, Mbeki has pinned a great deal on his brainchild plan for African renaissance, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). This offers a positive, new paradigm of engagement with the international community. In return for a commitment to good governance and democratization, Africa seeks a combination of trade concessions, new aid, and, above all else, investment. The United States must be involved as a key partner if NEPAD is to succeed in its ambitious goals. 

South Africa’s international foreign policy furrow also contradicts with the pragmatism its government has displayed at home, not only with regard to racial reconciliation but also concerning its pursuit of conservative macro-economic policies. The strong emphasis on reducing inflation and fiscal expenditure is not only surprising from a party that is social democratic (if not socialist) in ideological origins, but the more so one elected by South Africa’s poorest classes long denied equal economic access and brought up on a political diet explaining their plight in terms also of the excesses of Western global capitalism.  

Yet, given the background of the ANC and the current ruling elite, these twists and turns in the South Africa-U.S. relationship were quite predictable.  In 1993, a year before assuming presidential office, Mandela stated that “Human rights will be the light that guides our foreign affairs”. During his presidency (1994-1999), South Africa’s foreign relations were dominated by both his iconic personality and by its related profile of re-acceptance into the community of nations. As Mandela gathered international plaudits, Pretoria expanded three-fold its bilateral ties to number more than 90 overseas missions, took its seat among a variety of international organizations including the UN General Assembly, the 14-member Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Commonwealth and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Under Mbeki, it has gone on to chair the Commonwealth and NAM. The hosting, in quick succession, of the World AIDS conference in 2000, the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in 2001, and, in 2002, both the inaugural meeting of the African Union in July and the World Conference for Sustainable Development (WSSD) in September, has reinforced its global prominence. But the strongly independent line evident over Iraq and Zimbabwe has increasingly come into view as South Africa’s international position has normalized. Underlying this is an anti-Western sentiment, not informed by direct interests but rather a history of colonization and the socialist background of many of the ANC’s leadership, and by the historical ambivalence and indeed outright opposition to the ANC by some Western leaders, notably Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, historically contrasted with the support received from NAM and socialist bloc countries. It is also shaped, in the case of the Middle East, by religion and, more importantly, overall by race, the latter the most visceral and difficult-to-curb legacy of South Africa’s apartheid past. 

Certainly both race and anti-colonialism have determined its policy towards Zimbabwe, where South Africa's "quiet diplomacy" is seen by many as little more than an excuse for inaction rather than displaying the alternatives to the soft line ineffective in the face of Mugabe’s obduracy. While Pretoria casts its alternatives between talking to Harare and invasion, this is not the reality though it does speak volumes about the constraints the ANC operates in at home and regionally among electorates that largely support Mugabe’s action on the grounds that it is portrayed as dispossessing white farmers and "sticking it" to Britain, the former colonial overlord. In spite of the impact of Mugabe’s misrule on mainly black Zimbabweans, Mbeki’s administration has consistently articulated the Zimbabwe crisis in terms of land distribution and the solution consequently thus resting at the door principally of the UK. Pretoria will not, in the circumstances, act against Mugabe. As South Africa's foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma put it this March, condemnation of Harare’s actions “will never happen so long as this [ANC] government is in power.” 

At the root of these differences is Mbeki’s focus on the need for a power shift globally. In this light, NEPAD is not just about improving the economic lives of Africans through good governance and adherence to the rule of law, but also to change the nature of the relationship between North and South -- between Africa and its political and economic colonizers -- that he believes lies at the root of this inequality. This is rooted in his view that there can be no long-term sustainable change and development in Africa without reform of the UN and trade and financial architecture. This, one analyst has noted, “is the objective that drives all [Mbeki’s] policy initiatives”. As the President has argued: "'Unipolarity' and 'unilateralism' mean that one power, with a little help from its friends, takes decisions about what happens in the world, including our countries, without our participation."  

The danger is, however, that Mbeki is biting off more than he can chew and risking South Africa’s hard-won moral high ground both in Africa and beyond. For by attacking the United States and UK while they remain operating within the confines of the UN over Iraq, he undermines the very multilateral system that he is trying supposedly to enhance. In this regard, despite Mbeki’s assurance that a South African team of weapons inspectors led by Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad touring Iraq in February were there to “to share with their counterparts our experience relating to South Africa’s elimination of weapons of mass destruction under international supervision”, on their return Pahad said that, “It’s clear there is movement on the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction. Clearly [the inspection regime is working, and if it’s working, why stop it?"  

Moreover, his stance on Iraq does not square with Pretoria’s quiet diplomacy over Zimbabwe -- if Baghdad, why not Harare? This not only neglects the rapidly worsening socio-economic and political situation within Zimbabwe, but risks fallout with South Africa’s SADC partners. As Botswana’s President Festus Mogae has described the Zimbabwe situation by comparison, “It is a drought of good governance that is much more difficult because you have neighbors like Zimbabwe.” Elsewhere in Africa, Mbeki’s attempts to lift the Commonwealth suspension of Zimbabwe by this March have been met with strong resistance from Kenya.

There is little doubt that much of the ANC’s rhetoric is intended for South Africa’s domestic audience, especially its Muslim community that, although it makes up just two percent of the overall population of 42 million, is politically vocal and influential. There is also a constant need for Pretoria to dismiss the perception of those in Africa that it operates economically and politically as little more than an embassy for Western views on the continent. Pretoria’s response is thus a difficult balancing act, one between keeping close enough to the United States to have a voice, but shrill enough to keep its credentials in Africa and among the South. 

But this should not understate the more deeply held views within the ANC about the West in general, and the United States and Republicans in particular. This sentiment is dangerous to both South African and American longer-term interests, and one that is both as misinformed about the realities of American domestic and foreign policy as it is founded on a combination of perceptions about race, domination, exclusion and imperialism. To this extent, Pretoria remains a costly prisoner of its paradigm of international engagement. 

The contemporary paradox of improving trade and investment relations and growing bilateral political estrangement between Washington and Pretoria will have to be reconciled lest the relationship deteriorate further.  This is a key priority for Mbeki, Pahad and the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Walter Kansteiner. It is axiomatic that South Africa and the United States have much to offer globally in partnership beyond just bilateral economic ties – from co-operating in the war against terror to sharing transitional experiences from disarmament to democracy, common features both to NEPAD and the Bush Administration’s weltanschauung  

Greg Mills is the National Director of The South African Institute of International Affairs.