There has seldom been as ill-considered a rant as that placed on record by the SA Ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, at an online dialogue organised by an ANC think tank.
During a feverish ‘analysis’ of the US, Rasool managed to insult by name the US President, Donald Trump, his strongest ally, Elon Musk and the Vice President, JD Vance.
In one fell swoop he has placed himself (now persona non grata in the US) and his country in jeopardy.
But Rasool has not done so alone.
Responsibility for that must rest with the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa who put him there, his second term in Washington after a lacklustre first during the comparatively amenable Obama years. While the South African president has to burden his share of the blame for his fast and loose handling of foreign relations, it’s the African National Congress and the system it advocates that is principally to blame.
Rasool with his impulse to present himself as a left ‘theoretician’ is no doubt admired by the party whose leadership, to put it politely, lack intellectual depth.
This is an ambassador clearly unfit and unsuited to being a diplomat. Sent initially to the United States following a corruption scandal during his time as Premier of the Western Cape (now in opposition hands), he represented Ramaphosa’s predecessor, Jacob Zuma, responsible for a R1.5 trillion ‘state capture’ looting spree.
Cushy pension plan
But the ANC has long regarded the diplomatic service as a cushy pension plan for washed up politicians just as it treats the civil service, now three times larger than during the apartheid years, as a vehicle for what it terms “cadre deployment”.
Until now, South African foreign policy has been officially predicated on upholding human rights. When that noble goal foundered at the end of Nelson Mandela’s rule, the guiding principle became solidarity – with Palestine, Cuba and African states with leadership cut from the same cloth, no matter their commitment to democracy or human rights. Foreign matters were a counterbalance to moderate economic policies at home, as if to cement the ANC’s radical credentials.
It’s not as if the ANC was not warned what was coming. In early February, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order suspending aid to South Africa on account of its claimed mistreatment of white farmers and Pretoria’s foreign policy. This was followed four days later by a letter the American president received from four US congressmen. The letter from Andrew Ogles, Tom Tiffany, Joe Wilson, and Jon Bacon asserted that an “ethnonationalist gangster regime in Pretoria” was “working to be the undisputed successor to Mao’s destructive land reform policies” and had not only “failed to demonstrate a consistent fidelity to the rule of law” but had displayed “continued insistence on undermining American security and foreign policy interests” from supporting Hamas to attacking Israel and US ally Taiwan.
As a consequence, the authors requested the President to “revoke South Africa’s preference benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)” and suggested that Trump also “consider suspending diplomatic ties unless that [South African] government is prepared to engage constructively with our own”.
The battle lines were drawn and, in a fit of hubris, Ambassador Rasool undiplomatically blundered over them, declaring in a speech last week that Trump is leading a white supremacist movement in America and around the world. He added that South Africa could lead the pushback to Trump’s white supremacism, since the country was “the historical antidote to supremacism,” and that it could use Trump’s “healthy disrespect” for global institutions that South Africa feels are dominated by the West, commenting that Trump’s stance was like “a broken clock being right twice a day”.
Asleep at the wheel
Ramaphosa may simply be overwhelmed or asleep at the wheel. Perhaps the ANC has intentionally been steering the process towards this showdown, a move to try and spark a BRICS-led international uprising. The timing of the announcement of the visit by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which was made in the immediate wake of the Ukrainian leader’s Oval Office meltdown, may be another indicator as to South Africa’s foreign policy intentions.
Most likely, however, the ANC probably thought it could continue to play the racecard at home and abroad scot-free. It’s a reckless amateur move risking South Africa’s national interest, though part of the problem is that the ANC sincerely believes it represents the national interest – even though its collapse in the last national election to 40% of the vote would suggest otherwise.
Rasool, who had run the party’s 2019 election campaign, had been ranked 75th on the ANC’s national election list for 2024, but this was not high enough for him to be returned to parliament given the decline in the ANC’s support.
The losers of this idiocracy are of course the poor in South Africa whose interests the ANC likes to pretend it represents. The US market is South Africa’s second largest for exports after China, and 600 American firms represent the largest single investor in the Republic, employing more than 120,000 South Africans.
The ending of the trade preferences to South Africa under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) now looks certain. Sanctions and export tariffs may also be inevitable. Perhaps Washington might like to use individual sanctions against ANC figures before it punishes the whole country for their dogmatism and stupidity.
[Image: Flickr: 120725-D-BW835-487, public domain]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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