ISS TODAY: SA’s Pahad panel pines for the past By Peter Fabricius Pfabric
The long-awaited foreign policy review commissioned by President Cyril Ramaphosa and submitted to government last week doesn’t offer a new South African foreign policy nearly as much as it proposes, implicitly, a return to the foreign policy of the Mbeki era.
The report fondly recalls South Africa’s activism on the continent during the Mbeki era, particularly Pretoria’s role in shaping the transformation of the Organisation of African Unity into the African Union and in launching key AU programmes such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and the African Peer Review Mechanism.
The panellists seem to have had other countries in mind too, including perhaps the largely Francophone countries that promoted the return of Morocco to the AU in 2017, which South Africa opposed. The report implicitly blames this defeat on the loss of Pretoria’s influence on the continent. As it does the fact that ‘more outside countries are making some concerted diplomatic incursions into [Africa], receiving warm and encouraging receptions from a number of countries’.
The report also sensibly addresses many of the more practical critiques of foreign policy which have accumulated over the past decade. These include the excess of political appointments to key diplomatic posts, the disciplinary and low work ethic problems among South Africa’s diplomats, and the need for greater focus on economic diplomacy.
But to return to Africa, if the panel is right in recommending that South Africa resume its Mbeki-era leadership on the continent, the question must be asked, to what end? Apparently, this was because it felt that suspect countries like France and Rwanda were attempting regime change. Or was it simply out of pragmatic necessity? Was this the best option for the long-suffering Congolese?
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