President Cyril Ramaphosa. (Photo by Minasse Wondimu Hailu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Advice as to who President Cyril Ramaphosa should name as the country’s new envoy to Washington abounds but finding the right diplomat to reset a relationship in deep crisis will take time despite the nomination of a new US ambassador to South Africa, sources close to the process said.
The initial instinct in diplomatic circles was to move at speed to name a successor for Ebrahim Rasool, who was expelled three months into his posting, before relations could take any further downturn.
President Donald Trump’s nomination this week of Brent Bozell III, a crusader against alleged liberal media bias and the father of a pardoned January 6 rioter — the mob that protested against Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 US elections — has further added to that sense of urgency.
The thinking is that if the two governments were to consider the credentials of their nominees at the same time, it would give South Africa some diplomatic leverage to get its new ambassador accepted by a hostile administration.
It is reliably understood that this will not move Ramaphosa, whose choice of Rasool was criticised as reckless by more than one commentator.
In hindsight, there is an element of regret that the decision to redeploy the former leader of the ANC in the Western Cape in December was taken too swiftly after last year’s US elections and without regard for the risks of sending a politician with his profile to face tensions foretold.
For Ramaphosa the deciding factor was Rasool’s prior experience of Washington and the contacts he made on Capitol Hill while serving as ambassador from 2010 to 2015, during Barack Obama’s two-term presidency.
Rasool’s letters of credence were accepted by outgoing president Biden and sources said this was an early source of irritation for the incoming administration.
The second, bigger grievance was his overt pro-Palestinian sympathies. The now former ambassador was quoted, shortly before he left for the US last year, as saying South Africa’s decision to bring a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide in its military campaign in Gaza confirmed the country’s status as a “moral superpower”.
Within weeks, neo-conversative analysts and advisers in Washington were accusing him of supporting Hamas, defending Iran and Russia and exemplifying, in the words of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, “the ANC’s brand of anti-Western foreign policy”. The think tank called on Trump to “fire” him.
“The knives were out for him for a while,” a well-placed government source said.
“There was the fact that he is Muslim and then they came across his past utterances where he expressed support for the Palestinian liberation struggle. So this created hostility long before he made the remarks that led to his expulsion.”
Rasool had expressed deep frustration at the hurdles he faced in Washington, including rows of empty offices at the state department, and reservations about Ramaphosa’s plans to send a mission to mend fences after Trump signed an executive order cutting off all donor aid to South Africa.
His caution was that an African delegation representing a government accused of racial persecution of the Afrikaner minority might be subjected to the ritual humiliation that has become a US foreign policy staple. See Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s last-minute refusal this month to receive Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s high representative of foreign affairs and security policy last month.
Ramaphosa has delayed dispatching a trade mission to Washington he hoped would restore pragmatism to the bilaterial relationship. In private no one in South African foreign policy circles faults Rasool’s analysis of white supremacy driven by a demographic shift in the United States.
“But of course you cannot say it. It was a hugely damaging mistake,” a source close to the search for a suitable replacement said.
International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola has prepared a list of three potential nominees for Ramaphosa’s consideration. The presidency said many others have made their own, unsolicited suggestions.
The Democratic Alliance is advocating for the president to pick its founding leader, Tony Leon, for the post, but the suggestion of a retired opposition politician and consistent critic of government policy is a non-starter.
Commentators have mooted two individuals who, oddly, share a name: Marthinus van Schalkwyk, who is South Africa’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, and the country’s high commissioner to Australia, the Marthinus van Schalkwyk who was the post-apartheid National Party leader and became a member of the ANC and of Thabo Mbeki’s cabinet.
But neither Van Schalkwyk is an evident choice. The former plays a critical role in New York, where he has railed at Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, while the latter has never quite won the trust the government needs to place in the person they send to Washington in the present diplomatic deep freeze.
Most of those whose names have been formally forwarded to the president are white, and many are of Afrikaner heritage, in response to Trump’s embrace of AfriForum’s narrative of settler-descendent victimhood under the ANC.
“Demographics will be a consideration,” a close source said this week. “But it is not enough for the new ambassador to be white.”
The Afrikaners on the list on the president’s desk are at opposite political poles to those who have lobbied the White House and Congress for years to sanction the ANC for its policy choices. It includes Deputy Justice Minister Andries Nel, the son of an apartheid-era ambassador to the US.
Nel’s name was leaked days after Rasool’s expulsion. It was done to rally support for someone who is a firm favourite in diplomatic circles, not least for his even temperament and ability to think strategically.
His loyalty to the ANC, as a deputy minister for the past 16 years, is beyond dispute but so are his left-wing political views, which creates the risk that at some point he may have made pronouncements in which the White House could find cause not to accept his credentials.
That would further escalate the diplomatic crisis and, on a practical level, see the state incur the cost of moving someone to Washington only to have him shown the door.
Therefore Ramaphosa and his advisers will scrutinise the record of any candidate for anything that could give Trump, Rubio and the Republican caucus to reject a new envoy. They are doing this in the absence of first-hand impressions that could help guide a decision, given how little official engagement Rasool was afforded.
He flew back to South Africa on the very day he had been scheduled to meet a member of the National Security Council at the White House in what was seen as a minor breakthrough.
The relationship between Rubio and Lamola provides no touchpoint because it remains non-existent. The secretary of state has never accepted a phone call from his counterpart since taking office on 21 January, choosing instead to speak to the South African government in scalding tweets
This is how he announced Rasool’s expulsion and his decision in February not to attend the G20 meeting of foreign ministers, dashing Lamola’s hopes of private talks on the sidelines of the event.
“It is an extraordinary state of affairs that the country’s two top diplomats have never spoken and it has created a situation where we do not have the usual channel through which governments can communicate even at the worst of times, even when nations find themselves at war,” a source said.
Having a new US ambassador in Pretoria will create a new contact point, even if the immediate response to Bozell’s nomination was one of apprehension, mingled with a measure of relief that “at least it is not Joel Pollak”, the Breitbart editor who aggressively campaigned for the position with social media posts demanding the ANC change its domestic and foreign policy,
Pollak’s commentary dovetailed with recent statements by the US state department and at times sailed close to advocating regime change.
In the wake of Rasool’s expulsion, US state department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told a media briefing the new administration’s policy review on South Africa was prompted, inter alia, by its ties with Iran and Russia.
“The point is to encourage a change,” Bruce said. “It is the nature of changing policy.”
In that lies the real quandary Ramaphosa faces as he considers who to nominate.
The reality, an insider said, is that now no new ambassador may be able to engineer a detente in a crisis senior officials believe is not about white minority rights, however useful a dog whistle that may be for the Make America Great Again movement, nor the Expropriation Act or affirmative action, but the case against Israel pending before the ICJ.
“We cannot withdraw that matter, so there is no easy win we can give the Americans to resolve this rupture at this point.”
Another insider, again speaking on condition of anonymity, said this strengthened the argument for sending a politician to Washington who enjoyed broad trust within the ANC and could attempt not only to contain the diplomatic fallout — and speak to AfriForum’s lobbyists in their mother tongue — but work to bring the party’s approach to a powerful ally it has always treated with ambivalence into the present.
The ideological tension and its risks were plain at the weekend when the ANC ignored an appeal by Ramaphosa to exercise restraint when Rasool touched down in Cape Town. He was given a rapturous welcome and reiterated his criticism of Trump.
ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula’s description of the Trump administration in an opinion piece last week as “authors of neocolonialism and modern-day imperialism steeped in entrenching racial inequality” may not have been wrong but nor was it helpful.
The source said: “The party clings loyalty to powers like China that supported us during the liberation struggle. We also need someone who can forge ties in Washington and relay feedback to the ANC in a way that recalibrates our approach to America in a pragmatic way that serves the country, and also the party.
“We may have to accept that we cannot salvage much in these four years, but we have to look beyond them too.”