President Cyril Ramaphosa. (Photo by Minasse Wondimu Hailu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
In the late 1990s then foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma let slip that she was taking French lessons because the president, Thabo Mbeki, wanted her to learn the language spoken by much of Africa.
Two decades later, such gestures have long gone from South Africa’s approach to the continent and it has become more inward looking, partly because of the myriad problems the government has to grapple with at home.
The country’s vision of a cohesive Africa, which was championed by Nelson Mandela and strategically elaborated by Mbeki, changed under Jacob Zuma, according to Paul-Simon Handy, the regional director of the Institute for Security Studies in Addis Ababa. It became less driven by values and more by economic self-interest.
“Zuma turned the tide and was rather less the norm exporter but a business-seeking foreign policy actor. Where can South Africa’s businesses get the advantage in markets in Africa?” Handy said. “Which is fine [but] the only problem is that behind South Africa’s vested interests were actually his close friends’ business interests. But still there was this orientation towards Africa.
“Then Ramaphosa came and there was this feeling Ramaphosa was not interested in foreign policy. There are no signs that he has a strategy. He seems to be reacting to events rather than shaping and framing them. He has had successes but these tend to be rather happy accidents.”
Handy described South Africa’s management of the presidency of the African Union during the Covid-19 pandemic as a sterling success.
“If Covid had happened under the presidency of a less capacitated country, then Africa’s response to Covid would not have been as good as it was under Ramaphosa and South Africa. South Africa was able to manage that accident really well, showing that the country has the foreign policy apparatus to manage that kind of international event.
“But other than that I will struggle to see what the main achievement of South Africa’s foreign policy under Ramaphosa in his first term was.”
For Handy, Russia’s war in Ukraine has confirmed the lack of a clear foreign policy vision.
“At this point the claim of non-alignment, if it is that, for me is a slogan. And if it is non-alignment, it is a rather Russia-leaning non-alignment.”
He said he had strong reservations about the African peace mission to Russia and Ukraine, which Ramaphosa announced soon after the US ambassador to South Africa unleashed a diplomatic storm by saying there was proof arms were loaded onto a Russian vessel in Simon’s Town in December.
First, South Africa lacked credibility as a neutral negotiator. Second, Ramaphosa failed to involve the AU at a time when the latter is slowly transforming into an international policy actor.
“My first reservation is about South Africa and it is about the timing. One of the main factors in mediation is the perception of the conflicting parties. They should see the mediator as the neutral partner,” Handy said.
“If I were [Volodymyr] Zelenskiy and I saw a mediator like South Africa, who held a military exercise in February, literally, symbolically, on the first anniversary of the invasion, and then we have the developments with the US ambassador, and by the time he announced he wants to mediate, his army chief of staff is visiting Russia, and not Ukraine, my perceptions about neutrality might be different to what President Ramaphosa thinks.”
Although it was commendable that Ramaphosa had involved five other African countries — Congo, Egypt, Senegal, Uganda and Zambia — he had missed an opportunity to make the effort a continental one.
“But how do you do that without involving the African Union? It would have given the sense that this is less the initiative of a few African countries than something that is carried out by the majority of nations,” said Handy.
He compared it to Senegalese President Macky Sall’s mission last year, as then chair of the AU, to Russia to persuade Vladimir Putin to allow Ukrainian grain exports to Africa.
“I think this was the right way of giving a more collective appeal to that initiative and this is exactly what Ramaphosa’s is lacking. This is a missed opportunity by an important country like South Africa,” he said. “It is undermining the AU’s capacity to take up a more important international role.”
But Webster Zambara, a senior project leader in the peacebuilding interventions programme at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, believes South Africa still holds its place as one of the leading countries on the continent, with economic and geopolitical influence through its Brics membership and relationships with the West.
But Zambara conceded that South Africa’s foreign policy is unclear, feeding into the notion that its role is diminishing. In many instances, he said, South Africa still tries to work within the collective of the AU and regional groupings like the Southern African Development Community.
“However, South Africa now has myriad of problems of its own, so it is also looking internally to deal with its challenges including high unemployment, poverty, electricity breakdown and now the many protests against poor service delivery,” he said.
“So those become the priority [and] South Africa cannot continue to play a leading role on all aspects on the continent.”
Crediting the Ramaphosa-led government, Zambara pointed to a list of peacekeeping missions and negotiations in which South Africa has been involved, including in Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“President Ramaphosa could not even go to the inauguration of King Charles; he was in Burundi on a peace mission and South Africa is one of the countries trying to mitigate [the war between] Russia and Ukraine. So it’s playing a big role but its challenge is that it’s now facing a lot of internal issues at home that also need attention.”
Zambara said the strained relationship between South Africa and the United States did not necessarily translate to South Africa’s diminishing influence in geopolitics, calling it part of the “ups and downs” of diplomacy. In that regard, he cautioned against reading too much into South Africa not being invited to the G7 summit.
“It may be invited again in the future and make no mistake, we are even hearing that at AU level President William Ruto of Kenya has been pushing that we should not have countries representing the continent as individual countries in the AU and that may resonate with other African countries,” he said.