Anthony Holiday
Over a Barrel
The secret malaise is no longer concealable. Its symptoms are manifest everywhere from conclaves in Cape Town to the conflict in the Congo.
South Africa’s Department of Foreign Affairs – and hence also Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and President Nelson Mandela himself – are taking decisions and engaging in the most delicate and dangerous of negotiations blindfolded.
Their initiatives, when they are forced by circumstance to take them, are uninformed by anything but the crudest and most basic data, and their deliberations are unshaped by any of the geopolitical concepts which might have given form and purpose to what they are pleased to call their “foreign policy”.
This is why South Africa is unable to broker peace pacts in Angola or in the “Democratic” Republic of Congo. This is the reason our country has no voice that is truly its own to make heard concerning the global terror war, conducted by Islamic fundamentalist fanatics, on the one hand, and equally fanatical fundamentalists in the Pentagon, on the other.
And this ignorance is what lies behind the unaffordable split in the Southern African Development Community and the accusations in the Organisation of African Unity that the land of the rainbow people is just another pawn in a United States game plan.
It is an open secret that South Africa no longer possesses anything approaching what a developed nation would regard as a genuine intelligence capacity and certainly nothing like the flow of confidential information which PW Botha could command in the high days of the “total strategy”.
There are indeed intelligence- gathering organisations, like the National Intelligence Agency. But they are leaky, ramshackle contraptions, crippled by inefficiency and Byzantine office intrigues, as a new breed of African National Congress analysts and operatives struggle to wrest control from apartheid-era survivors.
In consequence (and doubtless also because of the friendly disposition Pretoria has evinced towards the likes of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Palestine’s Yasser Arafat and Libya’s Moammar Gadaffi), foreign intelligence agencies, like the CIA and MI6, no longer supply us with “feed” from their spy satellites – something they readily did before apartheid died.
Nobody ought to need telling that the daily flow of pictures these satellites provide has become the staple diet of spies in the developed world.
They can spot a truck moving on a jungle track, detect a store of detonators and pick out the tiniest of military training camps. Properly analysed, these pictures can render foreign-policy decision processes razor sharp. Without them, a modern spy or political adviser is like grandma without her bifocals.
Arguably more serious than this lack of access to the information yield from space technology is the dearth of properly trained and talented personnel which afflicts both the Department of Foreign Affairs and the intelligence services.
We simply do not have enough spies and diplomatic data gatherers on the ground in Africa and elsewhere to enable us to cope with, let alone manage, the current cycle of interlocking foreign relations crises.
Where (to take a case very much in point) are our advisers on Congolese politics? Is there a single South African civil servant, steeped in the languages, culture and power relations of that region and additionally armed with an adequate university education in the social sciences, to help Mbeki and Mandela prevent a sub-Saharan conflagration? Of course not.
But more dire than all these defects, it strikes me, is the circumstance that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has failed to generate ideas which might have served as the founding principles of a coherent foreign policy.
Short of these ideas – concepts to help our diplomats grapple with a dispensation in which the most basic terms of reference governing their craft have either changed or lost their meaning – even the richest supply of intelligence would be almost useless. Nobody would know what to do with it, how to make sense of it, how to employ it as a guide to action.
Let the worthies, who are now top dogs in our foreign affairs establishment, ask themselves how deeply they understand such concepts as “social contract”, “political community” and even the very notion of what used confidently to be called a “nation” in the context of today’s global sea change. If they answer honestly, their answers ought to frighten them. For, as far as I can see, they understand these matters not at all.
If this accusation is not unfair, then it must be said that they have only themselves to blame, although a large share of that blame rests squarely with Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad, who is, in practice, the man who runs the shop, while propping up dear, dozy old Alf Nzo, who is nominally the responsible minister.
It was Pahad who insisted on retaining, until his recent retirement, the services as director general of Rusty Evans, that trusty lieutenant of Pik Botha during times when apartheid foreign policy was synonymous with the destabilisation of our neighbours by warfare and terror.
It was Pahad who alienated at least one top foreign relations theorist – an academic, engaged in precisely the type of conceptual research which addresses our need for a new kind of foreign policy – with false accusations of “leaks” and a thinly veiled contempt for intellectual work.
And it has been Pahad who, instead of transforming the structure and management style of his outfit, has continued to try to live with an uneasy amalgam of the way foreign relations were managed by the ANC in the years when it was exiled and illegal and the style of work which characterised the department in Pik and PW’s day.
The upshot has been that, instead of a foreign policy, we have a hopeless mix of so-called “pragmatism”, so-called “realism” and general ad hocery that prevents us from making our own initiatives and leaves us little choice but to take Uncle Sam’s advice.
Is it too late, I wonder, for our government to learn that, in today’s world, if you fly your foreign affairs craft blind, somebody else is more than likely to fly it for you?
Dr Anthony Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape’s school of government. Howard Barrell is away. He will be writing again next week