For better or for worse, both Donald Trump and Paul Kagame have been giving South Africa’s visionless, incompetent and quite frankly soft leaders lessons in decisiveness and strategic planning.
As Dr Kagiso Pooe, a public policy specialist at the Wits School of Governance points out: “The government has taken almost three decades to admit it has failed. Internally, Trump clearly shows you need to be tougher on people who have entered the country illegally, even if this means revisiting the basis of the constitution.
“Secondly, as the region’s largest economy, you must take responsibility for what is around you. Have a look at how the ANC has allowed Zimbabwe and ZANU-PF to destabilise the region utterly. Trump, in forcing the Mexican government to control their borders, declaring drug cartels terrorist organisations, and the like, shows you must demand better from neighbours. In this regard, the South African government has failed not only South Africans but also Zimbabwe by letting ZANU-PF run amok.“
Illegal immigration and border management are just one issue in which Trump has shown decisiveness and responsiveness to the American people: something at which the South African government has failed dismally. South Africans loudly proclaim their disapproval of illegal immigration which sometimes spills over into ugly episodes of xenophobia and violence. It isn’t just the ANC that has been abysmal either. Opposition parties have shown a distinct lack of spine and fight in being responsive to issues around immigration and job creation (labour reform) because of what seems like a fear of unions and the chattering classes of left-wing academia and media.
For better or for worse, Trump and the apparatus around him will do what it takes to get their mandate across the line. Politics in both America and South Africa are not for choirboys, but for street brawlers who are ready to do what it takes to realise their political mandate.
Kagame for his part, despite all the unsavoury things he does within his country’s own borders and the unsavoury things he is doing in the Eastern DRC, also shows an acute strategic mind. It is worth asking why Kagame gets so little pushback from the West and even the rest of the continent, despite being an aggressive dictator. The answer lies in his strategic thinking.
Kagame has used Rwanda’s military capability to defend French LNG interests in Cabo Delgado against Muslim extremists, and he is all too willing to farm out that capability to any African country (like the Central African Republic) that wants to outsource its defence to someone else. This buys Kagame trust from both inside Africa and outside the continent, especially as Rwanda is the fifth-largest contributor to UN peacekeeping operations globally. The West can call on Rwanda not just to be a counterweight to Russian influence through the Wagner Group on the continent, but also to smooth over peacekeeping operations and help the West avoid any charges of neo-colonialism on the continent.
Rwanda is useful to all sorts of interests, which is why it gets scant condemnation from either the West or other African countries for siphoning off DRC’s natural resources (which the EU happily buys because of Rwanda’s stability). It is also then showered with all sorts of aid which dwarfs the aid its neighbours get. Despite being what can charitably be called a Potemkin Village, Rwanda has also strategically put itself front and centre in the eyes of Westerners through partnerships with football clubs like Arsenal, Paris St Germain and Bayern Munich, and projected an image of a safe and developing country that is nicknamed “the Singapore of Africa”. This has earned Rwanda a feel-good reputation amongst the over one million tourists who visited the country last year. This, by the way, is all being done by a country whose GDP is barely 55% of Durban’s GDP.
It begs the question: What if South Africa’s leaders had Paul Kagame’s strategic nous, and the ability to build a foreign policy that aligns with the self-interest of powerful countries while serving our own ends?
What if we had leaders with Trump’s decisiveness and Kagame’s strategic nous, who tackled crime and job creation and foreign policy without the ANC’s ideological blinkers and the opposition’s seeming spinelessness and lack of a compelling vision?
What is absolutely certain is that our weak and often incompetent leaders, with their ideological blinkers, have given us a country that is in decline and decay, with increasing levels of despair and violence and racial animus.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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