Presidents Cyril Ramaphosa and Joe Biden. Photo by Pete Marovich-Pool/Getty Images
President Cyril Ramaphosa has suggested that his United States counterpart initially encouraged him to talk to Russian leader Vladimir Putin to end his country’s war against Ukraine.
Ramaphosa told journalists on Sunday that Joe Biden had appreciated South Africa’s non-aligned stance on the Ukraine war in the hope that it would mediate in the conflict.
He reiterated that while Pretoria had been perceived as having close ties to the east, the country was non-aligned.
“And that gives us a very unique position, which many have started to appreciate, a unique position in that we can talk to all sides. This was initially also appreciated by the president of the United States, who said ‘you can talk to President Putin’,” Ramaphosa said.
“And indeed as we have gone out and spoken to both sides, [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskiy and Putin, and both of them have found us acceptable and found us to be interlocutors that they can deal with honestly and openly. And that is a position that can only really be properly occupied by a country that is decided on a particular course, which is non-alignment.”
Ramapohosa’s comments came just weeks after the US’s foreign affairs senate committee exerted pressure on the White House to break ties with South Africa.
Putin’s relationship with South Africa has been the cause of diplomatic tensions between Pretoria and Washington. South Africa’s willingness to host the Russian president at the Brics summit due to be held in August, despite a warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the alleged unlawful deportation of up to 19 000 Ukraine children to Russia, heightened tensions between the two countries.
Ramaphosa has, in the past six months, hosted many of his Western and African counterparts, including the leaders of Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, Portugal, Namibia, Botswana, Uganda and Namibia, with some analysts seeing this as his way of cementing South Africa’s influence in geopolitics.
Denying his focus on geopolitics had come at the tail end of his term, Ramaphosa said he was acutely aware of the need for interaction internationally.
He added that although South Africa was not the only United Nations member state that had taken a non-aligned stance, it had been singled out for censure.
He said the African leaders’ peace mission in mid-June had been successful because Putin and Zelenskiy had agreed to continue discussions with them.
Ramaphosaid said Pretoria would also continue to advocate for one currency for Africa and an alternative to the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
The topic of an alternative to the dollar is expected to dominate talks between heads of state when the Brics summit convenes. Ramaphosa said although there was a great appetite for another reserve currency, there was no easy solution to the matter.
“Well, this is an issue that should, yes, become a topic also in the forums that you’re going to be holding forward. So it is a matter that needs to be discussed, and it’s not an issue that is going to find an easy solution right away,” he told journalists.
“It’s more of a long term issue. And it’s a matter that we should not deal with as a holy cow when discussed. Just as we have to discuss an African currency issue.”