International relations minister Ronald Lamola during a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Lotte Palace Hotel on September 26, 2024 in New York. (Photo by Bryan R. SMITH / POOL / AFP)
South Africa cannot afford to waste the goodwill and respect it has engendered around the world by emerging from the seismic May elections with a stable coalition government, International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola has said.
Lamola told the Mail & Guardian last week that wherever he has travelled in his first 100 days in office, the government of national unity was viewed positively and its survival was vital to converting that sentiment into substantial foreign investment.
“It is very important for the long term,” he said.
“There is a clear positive sentiment towards South Africa which we will have to maintain, to continue the stability in our country, to turn it into a response to our domestic priorities.
“We need foreign direct investment for our economy to grow, and investors want a stable environment, and we have proven as a country, with the elections we have had and the manner in which we managed the outcome, that our democracy is maturing.
“In both the global south and the Global North, they wish us well, so it is an opportunity that South Africa will have to seize.”
If the government stayed the course and pressed on with reforms on energy supply and logistics, Lamola noted, analysts and trading partners believed economic growth of two percent could be achieved for the next two years.
Taking ministers from the former official opposition along on foreign trips was a way of show-casing the solidity of the coalition, without denying the ideological contestation at home over health and education legislation.
“We have also been very deliberate in ensuring that even on international platforms all cabinet members, irrespective of which organisation you come from, even if you are minister of agriculture and we are going to China to discuss agriculture, we take you along,” he said.
“We don’t mind that it is Mr [John] Steenhuisen, who is the leader of the Democratic Alliance [DA]. We brought all relevant departments that we believed would add value and it unlocked huge potential with regards to our exports.”
Similarly, he added, Environment Minister Dion George also went to the United National General Assembly last month for discussions on climate change, and to meet investors in the United States.
“The fact that all of us are speaking with one voice does show that this is a stable government, that South Africa is open for business.”
Lamola from the outset supported President Cyril Ramaphosa’s decision to seek an alliance with the DA after the ANC lost its electoral majority in May, while other senior figures in the party needed persuading.
Ramaphosa rewarded his loyalty and his role in bringing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice by promoting him from the justice portfolio to foreign affairs, despite the detail that unlike most diplomats, Lamola gets to the point without wasting time on small talk.
Minutes before he was sworn in, the minister set out his mission in two words — economic diplomacy. Four months later, he describes the job as “a humbling experience” but adds that he is enjoying the challenge.
This will, for some time to come, include delicate negotiations to build on the qualified breakthrough on reform of the UN Security Council the September trip to New York yielded.
Lamola confirmed that the US has agreed to text-based negotiations on the proposal tabled by its ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to give Africa two permanent seats on the council.
The offer does not include veto rights.
Lamola said the shift was brought about, in part, by Africa’s unity in calling for reform of the security council, in accordance with the Ezulwini Consensus adopted by the African Union in 2005.
But the AU’s demand has been for two or more permanent seats with full privileges attached, including the veto rights held by other present permanent members of the body.
Lamola agreed that it was now inevitable that African nations would hold different views on whether to accept the proposal in its present form, or hold out for a better offer.
“Obviously that debate will happen. It has to be robust, it must happen, we must confront it. It is a reality. It is now on the table. We have to engage as the continent and come up with a position that acknowledges the evolving reality that we are in.
“But I don’t think we should see it as a divide when it does happen because obviously differences of opinion will arise. I think that we, at the end of that debate, will be able to find consensus on the modalities.”
South Africa has already started discussions in this regard with fellow African states.
It is understood that South Africa’s inclination is to work pain-stakingly towards an improved proposal, knowing that it may take years to achieve reform approaching what it deems fair. It sees the agreement to trade draft proposals in writing, at the level of UN representatives, as significant because it helps to create momentum in negotiations.
Lamola simply said: “We are still processing the matter, and we are accepting that there is a debate we have to enter into.”
But he confirmed that ultimately South Africa was of the view that veto rights made for paralysis within the council.
“We think it is obsolete.”
The council was locked in a five-month impasse over the Israeli-Palestine crisis before finally managing in March to pass a resolution calling for a halt in the conflict in Gaza for Ramadan because the US abstained from the vote. In September, the US for the third time used its veto to block a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire.
Yet Lamola said he believed that by bringing a genocide charge against Israel, South Africa drove home the extent of the devastation inflicted on Gaza by defining it in law and so helped to shift the global perspective on the conflict.
“Almost all countries are now calling for a ceasefire. We think it is a great shift. Not only governments, but also societies are now standing up to call for a cessation of hostilities, for humanitarian aid. We think that represents a form of movement that must be consolidated through a real and actual ceasefire and a two-state solution.”
There was hope, Lamola added, that other European allies of Israel, including eventually France and Germany, may yet rethink their historical approach after Britain in July dropped its opposition to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.
“Hence we continue to engage them, we continue to call for respect for international law,” he said.
“There is a groundswell, maybe slow, maybe not at the pace of the conflict itself, but that should be encouraged. It is the only way forward. There will never be a military victory, the solution will come only through dialogue, through a ceasefire, through respect for the UN institutions.”
Ramaphosa in September told the UN General Assembly member states had an obligation to use every instrument within the institution to end the conflict and Palestinian suffering, but that the security council was failing in its mandate for peace.
“It must become more inclusive so that the voices of all nations are heard and considered,” he said.
“International law cannot be applied selectively. No one state is more equal than any other.”
South Africa has repeatedly been accused of failing itself to live up to this standard, lacking the even-handedness it demands of the West in dealing with the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
The charge stems, inter alia, from its record of abstention on UN resolutions against Russia and former foreign minister Naledi Pandor’s meeting with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Pretoria in January 2023.
“It is not fair,” Lamola countered.
But the perception grew when the government found itself in a diplomatic corner as it prepared to host the 15th Brics summit, five months after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on charges of orchestrating the unlawful abduction of Ukrainian children.
“He did not come. We always knew what our obligations were,” is how Lamola summarises the saga, which required persuading Putin to stay at home and deliver a message to the summit through a video-link.
“One of the issues that our president raised during his engagement with Mr Putin was in particular that of the release of the children and there has been movement from the side of Russia in that regard,” he added, before conceding that it was limited.
Non-alignment has long been Pretoria’s short-hand explanation of its foreign policy — and counter to criticism. Successive administrations have not cared to define its relevance in a post-colonial, post-Cold War order.
Lamola is more willing to do so. He is unequivocal that the Bandung principles, the 1956 manifesto from which the movement grew, applies to the Ukrainian question, including respect for national sovereignty and territorial integrity and freedom from external aggression.
And he thinks that the current struggle for a fairer dispensation for the Global South lies in confronting the inequitable burden it carries on climate change, lobbying for the reform of multilateral financial institutions and demanding an equal voice “on a developmental level and in peace negotiations”.
South Africa will use its upcoming presidency of the G20 to fight for the above, he said.
Lamola returned to the role of the Global South in what he described as a moment of crisis in world affairs in an address on Friday to the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.
“In this dangerous geopolitical moment, the champions of the liberal international order generally refuse to accept any notions of decline and would resist any attempt to emerge an alternative, least of all one from the Global South.
“But that we have to go through this interregnum is beyond doubt.”