Ebrahim Rasool is one of those politicians with the best intentions and the worst outcomes. A hooker could die in his hotel room, and it wouldn’t be his fault.
Genuinely devastated, he would explain to the police that an emaciated girl had knocked on his door, he immediately rang Imtiaz for a care package, she then tried to get high, he rushed to stop her but tripped, accidentally knocked her off the bed whereupon she hit her head on the side table and perished.
It would be a tragedy not of his hand, the public would agree and sympathise – but the following week he’d be invited to cut the ribbon on a new factory in Ottery, sponsored by Habib Bank, then press the wrong button on a wall activating a metal door that would descend from the roof and crush three elderly people sitting in wheelchairs below.
Ebrahim Rasool in 2025 is not a diplomatic appointment as much as he is an expression of arrogance. Despite the fact that 2024 wasn’t looking good for the ANC, its decision to drag Israel to the ICJ at the end of the previous year was indicative of a bullish mood. It saw itself scraping through the elections, if only just.
More importantly, it saw Kamala Harris winning in November’s presidential elections. And even more importantly, it calculated that even in the unlikely event that she didn’t win, the mood in Washington was sour and anti-Israel – and there was no better way to complement anti-US sentiment by dragging back an anti-US envoy.
Collective gasp
A week from Christmas last year there was a collective gasp when Sir Keir Starmer announced his pick for UK Ambassador to the US: Peter Mandelson. Trump wasn’t even in office when Labour ministers were being paraded – like suspects apprehended in Thailand – for their past anti-Trump remarks. One of the worst offenders was Mandelson, a party grandee from the Blair years who had resigned in disgrace twice, partially enabled the Post Office Horizon scandal – the (until last year) greatest miscarriage of justice in British history – and who once enjoyed a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
In 2019 Mandelson called Trump a “racist” and declared him “a threat to the world”. After weeks of Labour cabinet ministers being exposed for trying to win friends also by calling Trump racist, the public – and Trump’s own campaign manager Chris LaCivita – concluded that Mandelson’s appointment was inappropriate.
But Mandelson is one of the craftiest operators you’ll encounter. What people didn’t know then was that Mandelson, who is gay, is an old friend of Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, who is also gay. The two have holidayed together with their partners. Then there is Peter Thiel, a man whom Mandelson also knows and who reportedly has Trump’s ear. He too is gay. In December, the thought of Mandelson entering an environment with a heightened demand for the Epstein lists appeared hopeless – but last weekend Trump accepted his credentials.
Anything useful
It doesn’t appear that Ebrahim Rasool possesses anything that may be useful to South Africa, as it seeks to halt a rapid decline in its relationship. He doesn’t have a sophisticated network of gay insiders and billionaires. He doesn’t play golf, know Bitcoin, AI, or appear to have any affection for the richest man in the world, born and raised in the country he represents. He once wrote a chapter for a foundation’s quarterly about Islamophobia, but Trump’s America, unlike Starmer’s England, doesn’t kneel and begin washing feet when it hears that word.
During his early teens, he was accused of trying to tempt journalists with cash into writing nice stories about him – which, again, appears to have been rotten luck. Adriaan Basson does that stuff for free. Or a large plate of onion bhaji. Does Rasool drink? Presumably not. Trump doesn’t either. Perhaps there’s something.
This failing gamble sits adjacent to the other failing gamble of renaming Sandton Drive which has graduated from an issue of standard ANC profligacy and hubris into one of national security. Had Harris won, as the ANC hoped and believed she would, it’s not a stretch to think she’d be invited to the very celebrations by the renaming ceremony working-group chaired by Nomvula Mokonyane – but only after important tasks like procuring paper napkins (@R4k ea) were completed.
Given what we know about Harris, she may well have worn Kente cloth to the proceedings. Given what we know about her husband, Mr. Douglas Emhoff, there may well have been a smirk across the man’s face as he listened to Leila Khaled explain how it feels to be a woman and watch the Improvised Explosive Device she made blow a man’s leg off – perhaps imagining what it would be like to make love to a suicide bomber – then comparing that to making love to a nanny.
Progressive doctrine
For three decades, the ANC thrived in the shadows of US progressive doctrine, underwritten by rackets like USAID where shady globalists attended to the party’s sense of entitlement and allowed it to cream off both the developed power centres and the emerging ones. It is now scrambling from defiance to submission: one minute it claims it will not be bullied, the next it is bullied into relocating Taiwan’s embassy.
At the end of 2023 it was crying poverty, then a few days later it miraculously happened upon the cash it needed to haul Israel to the ICJ – and make payroll. This sort of thing doesn’t work for outsiders like Trump.
What works is Mandelson’s kind of resourcefulness. Did Mandelson respond to criticism in December by claiming that he’d stand on the principle of his unwise remarks? Why would he, when the insult was demonstrably false? Did he organise press conferences to toss around copies of the works of the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, persecuted by Fidel Castro for being gay? Did he make a TikTok wearing a pride bikini, appealing to the last remaining social justice receptors in the US body politic? Neither. He went to his black book from which he was able to form a little network. He reached out to the personalities in Trump’s inner circle and got ready to apologise for those daft comments. Trump respects this kind of initiative.
Last week Mandelson, whilst on a train, told a journalist from London’s Financial Times to “f*** off”. Trump would be encouraged by that too.
Rasool’s presence in Washington does nothing to assuage concerns that South Africa is flirting with the prospect of US relations last seen in the 1980s. White editors and “veteran journalists” in South Africa are endorsing wild calls for the country to initiate international sanctions against Washington – to say nothing of the country joining wild movements such as The Hague Group.
Unless a radical departure in thinking comes about – like parachuting an accomplished diplomat like Tony Leon into Washington immediately (in whose extended network sit people like the financier Stephen Schwarzman) – then the coming whirlwind won’t just threaten another generation’s already precarious chances. It will find its way into the dollar stashes of people like Patrice Motsepe.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/oasoea/11354631315/in/photostream/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend