Next year, South Africa will celebrate 20 years of democracy and two decades of engagement with the rest of Africa.
The country’s relationship with the continent has changed from one of open hostility to a strong and pro-active involvement by South Africans in almost every region of Africa, and it has been a difficult process with mixed results.
Critics say the South African government has no clear strategic guidelines for its involvement in Africa, and that development aid is distributed piecemeal and on an ad hoc basis.
However, others believe South Africa is doing more than its share of training, peacekeeping and mediation in conflict zones on the continent, in the interest of a peaceful and prosperous Africa.
At times, in an effort not to be seen as the rich big brother handing out aid, South Africa’s contribution has been underplayed, experts say.
The new South African Development Partnership Agency (Sapda), which is expected to be launched early next year, could be a vehicle for a co-ordinated effort to make sure South Africa’s help goes to the right people and makes an impact.
So far, in the twenty years since the end of apartheid, South Africa’s aid to the continent has been marked by efforts to bring stability to war torn countries and to help with post-conflict reconstruction, says Neissan Alessandro Besharati, project manager at the South African Institute of International Affairs and author of a new report on the planned Sapda.
“The drivers of aid from South Africa were initially political and aimed to re-establish alliances after apartheid, and in exchange for support for the anti-apartheid struggle.
“Now there is a realisation that we should be more strategic. South Africa’s involvement in conflict zones is clearly pragmatic: if you don’t intervene, you risk having more refugees flocking to South Africa,” says Besharati.
There are no clear figure of how much South Africa is contributing in terms of aid and other assistance to the rest of Africa.
Aid and initiatives
The African Renaissance Fund (ARF), which channels aid to governments, receives $500-million from the South African budget, but the money has been disbursed in a very ad hoc manner.
“Over the decade ARF projects included agricultural projects in Zimbabwe, cultural projects in Mali, humanitarian assistance in Somalia, dams in Lesotho, and even providing support to the Africa Cup of Nations,” Besharati writes in the report.
He adds: “Pretoria has attempted to use its development assistance as soft diplomacy to enlist the support of other countries for its candidacy to the African Union (AU) and United Nations (UN) bodies (securing a seat on the UN Security Council) and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s chairmanship to the African Union.”
Apart from the ARF, a wide range of initiatives are ongoing, led by various government departments and institutions, such as the Independent Electoral Commission, which does training, provides technical assistance and gives scholarships on a bilateral basis, often in post-conflict countries.
Former president Thabo Mbeki, who was very committed to peace building efforts on the continent, spearheaded initiatives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan — two countries where South Africa’s involvement has been the most visible.
Andre Roux, senior researcher at the conflict management and peace-building division of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), says: “Hundreds of millions of rands” were spent in the negotiations to end the war in the DRC in the late 1990s.
“Two hundred delegates were housed at Sun City for a year and were paid expensive per diems to facilitate the peace talks,” he recalls.
Following the peace agreement, South Africa printed the ballots for the 2006 presidential elections and for legislative and local polls that followed.
The ballots were transported to the capital Kinshasa and then to key sites in the interior of the country.
“We had 130 aircraft involved in the delivery operation,” says Roux.
In addition, South Africa played an important role in making sure the warring parties kept to their commitments and in the demobilisation of soldiers after the war.
This included building bases, donating computers and software, as well as assisting with a complex audit to root out corruption in the army’s payroll system.
From 2002 to 2008, South Africa had a reinforced battalion of 850 troops as part of the UN force in the DRC, which had to deal with a range of new rebel groups.
Lately, South Africa has been praised for its role as part of the special UN Intervention Brigade, which clinched an important victory against M23 rebels in early November.
Humanitarian aid in conflict zones
In South Sudan, South Africa has been playing a key role in training about 1 500 civil servants and police in the run-up to independence in July 2011.
According to Peter Bior Alier Biar from the embassy of South Sudan in Pretoria, this was a major task given that “the whole society was armed” following two decades of war with the north.
“One had to change the mindset of people from a conflict situation to being a civil servant. It is a whole different philosophical approach. South Africa has done well in helping us with this.”
South Africa was also chair of the commission for post-conflict reconstruction, set up by the AU.
According to Bior, the idea was for the South Sudanese to take over the training and capacity building from the AU team, but due to the financial crisis that hit the country because of hostilities with Sudan, this hasn’t been done.
A number of South African companies, such as MTN, SAB Miller and Standard Bank, have set up shop in South Sudan, a country that has to be built from scratch.
The government is certainly not the only South African institution doing work in conflict zones.
Humanitarian organisations such as Gift of the Givers are involved in aid work in Somalia, where it has sent several teams of medical personnel over the past few years and think-tanks such as the ISS are involved in a range of capacity building initiatives across the continent.
According to Besharati, South African universities have also played a big role in Africa.
“These centres of learning have opened their classrooms to students from the neighbouring SADC countries for the same or similar fees as local students,” he writes.
In terms of government funding, a lot of money is ploughed into multilateral institutions such as the AU, where South Africa plays a key role.
About $150-million to $200-million are transferred annually to the AU, says Besharati.
A big contribution is also made to AU institutions such as Nepad and the Pan-African Parliament, which are both housed by South Africa.
But does this mean South African aid is really making a difference?
Besharati says South Africa is still a very small player when it comes to development aid, compared to traditional donors in the West and also countries such as China and Brazil.
“None of South Africa’s foreign aid is significant enough to make a real impact. It is rather a foreign policy tool.”
He believes that the Sapda could lead to better co-ordination of South Africa’s aid to Africa, provided it has good leadership.
The idea, which has been mooted for several years now, is to channel all South African assistance, including funding from third parties, through the Sapda.
Cheryl Hendricks, professor in the department of politics at the University of Johannesburg, who has also done research in this field, says what is lacking in South Africa is a clear plan of how to deliver assistance.
“We should think through where and to whom we are going to give aid. At the moment it is done on an ad hoc basis because we don’t have a clear overarching strategy.”
She says it would be good to have a new structure to co-ordinate aid, but it will be a problem if civil society organisations engaged in work on the continent also go through the Sapda.
“There’s a big difference between co-ordinating and controlling,” she says.
This article was produced in partnership with the South Africa Forum for International Solidarity (Safis) safis.org.za. Views expressed here do not necessarilly reflect those of Safis or the Mail & Guardian