‘Crisis? What crisis?” asked British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan as he arrived back in London from an international summit in late 1978. It was one of my first political memories. Britain had just commenced its infamous ”Winter of Discontent”.
Dustbin men, ambulance drivers and gravediggers, among others, were on strike. Soon the streets would be piled with rubbish; people died waiting for an ambulance to arrive; the dead waited days to be buried.
Of course, Callaghan didn’t actually say ”What crisis?” any more than Thabo Mbeki did last weekend. ”I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos,” said ”Sunny Jim” (as Callaghan was colloquially known). But it was the political suicide note of a prime minister who had lost touch with his country. Six months later Margaret Thatcher romped to power to begin 18 years of Conservative rule.
What Mbeki said about Zimbabwe a week ago was: ”If no one wins a clear majority, the law provides for a re-run. If that happens, I would not describe it as a crisis.” But what he might consider to be nuance and diplomatic sophistication many would regard as plain absurd. His legacy is draining away almost as fast as his power within the ANC.
Yet Union Building spin-doctors such as Tony Heard, who should know better, defend Mbeki’s strategy on Zimbabwe to the hilt despite the absence of any evidence of success. At Polokwane, his closest advisers were reassuring Mbeki that he would win up to the very last moment. Do they fear the truth or their boss? Or, like him, have they been closeted in high office and detached from reality for so long that they have lost all perspective?
On these pages last week Tawanda Mutasah deftly suggested that Mbeki read South Africa’s Constitution to Robert Mugabe. But as the old adage asserts, foreign policy begins at home. In which case, there is cause for concern.
If we do not respect human rights at home, what chance is there that we will care about their violations beyond our borders? Refugees are treated disgracefully by an incompetent Department of Home Affairs. Xenophobia is rife. There is little evidence to believe that most South Africans care two hoots about anyone else in the world, still less their oppressed neighbours in Zimbabwe.
Thus the painful irony is that, having benefited from the greatest ever global coalition against oppression — the anti-apartheid movement — South Africans have disengaged from the world. There is more than a whiff of American exceptionalism and introversion to this country: we are different and we are special, and we don’t need to care about anyone or anywhere else.
Around the world, decent progressive people, many of whom are long-time ANC supporters and who were active members of the anti-apartheid movement, are finding themselves increasingly disenchanted with the foreign policy positions that South Africa is adopting — not least since it began a two-year term on the Security Council last year.
The reality is that in many capitals of the world, there is a growing credibility gap. This crisis in South African foreign policy occurs against the backdrop of an administration that began with such an ambitious foreign policy agenda, including: revitalising the non-aligned movement, leading a south-south common agenda for reform of global governance, driving the idea of African Peer Review, while seeking to play a constructive role in the Middle-East based on South Africa’s own model of negotiated transition.
There have been accomplishments, not least in the African peace-making arena, but in the end South African foreign policy has succumbed to the ornate machinations of Mbeki; as with many other areas of policy, he has neither been able to articulate a vision nor take his people with him in realising it.
And now, even if Mugabe is somehow compelled to bow to the will of his people, thanks to Mbeki’s stance on Zimbabwe, South Africa’s credibility in the global north has been seriously undermined.
Which begs the question that a European diplomat put to me earlier this week: in the future, who will restore South Africa’s place in the world? The implication — an understandable one — is that whether the next president is Jacob Zuma or Kgalema Motlanthe, the main preoccupations are likely to be domestic rather than international. Neither man has the taste or the zeal for international diplomacy that Mbeki has.
That may not be an entirely bad thing, but the question of who will be the next foreign minister becomes a very important one.
It must be someone who can live up to the visionary promise of the new South Africa and not the limping obfuscation and disappointment of the latter days of the Mbeki administration.
Someone, I suggest, who knows the world and whom the world knows. Someone who balances a sense of injustice and a desire for radical reform with a measured realism about what is possible and prudent during a time of financial and political insecurity.
Recently I heard Trevor Manuel open a conference on global administrative law and his discussion of current international political economy was as impressive as it was eloquent.
When the chair of the session, Judge Dennis Davis, thanked Manuel he added, with justified sentimentality, that the speech had made him ”proud to be a South African”.
He should be the next foreign minister (Manuel, not Davis).
Actually, he should probably be the next president, but that, apparently, is not possible, so the question is whether he will continue in public service or will be lost to the private sector.
Manuel knows what it will take to restore the world’s faith in South Africa so that those who demonstrated solidarity in the struggle against apartheid can remain proud.