Turning away from the West

The main emphasis of Zuma's administration—and indeed that of the ANC in Luthuli House—has been to de-emphasise relations with the West, and to forge closer ties with China and Russia, a calculation driven by geo-strategic considerations, as well as more narrow commercial interests that became most associated with President Zuma.

Zuma would view structures such as the BRICS as important fora on which to cast his own foreign policy legacy, even though he did not set out distinct and unique ideas about South Africa’s purpose in the world. He also tended to see countries such as China as one of several possible allies outside of the West. This, without so much even considering South Africa’s long-term economic interests.

Mbeki too had been wary of the West, but he had strong open channels to working with Western countries in order to find solutions to the complex developmental challenges facing Africa. Mbeki was able to balance antiimperialism and cooperation with the West in ways that Zuma could not. In Mbeki ’ s calculation, programmes such as the NEP AD offered a redemptive platform for the West to pay for its historical debt to developing countries. Zuma, on the other hand, pursued a vulgar form of anti-colonialism, not grounded in any principled position or framework of ideas. For Mbeki, it was important to maintain relations with the West to keep it wedded to its historical responsibility towards Africa’s development. For example, when he was deputy president, Mbeki enjoyed a strong relationship with US Vice-President Al Gore, under President Bill Clinton's Democratic Administration. They both chaired the Bi-national Commission established in 1995. He enjoyed a cordial relationship with Republican President George W. Bush. Mbeki was a member of the Progressive Governance Forum. This is where he joined Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, the US’s Bill Clinton and Sweden’s Goran Persson, a group of enlightened leaders that sought to renew social democracy or the “Third Wave”. This ideological project was one where the states and markets would co-reinforce each other in delivering economic efficiencies, infrastructure and social equity.

Before Zuma, South Africa’s foreign policy straddled many fronts. It would narrow significantly in the years between 2009 and 2018, with Zuma preferring to work closely with non-democratic and state-capitalist states such as China and Russia. Hostility to the West rather than defining a positive agenda became the hallmark of South Africa’s policy.

Noting South Africa’s shift towards a close embrace with China, The Economist newspaper pointed out the relationship with China: “The ANC seems to think that commerce with China will flourish only if South Africa is hostile to the West” (“South Africa’s Foreign Policy: Clueless and Immoral”. The Economist, 2015). A milder view of shifts in South African foreign policy was offered by Garth Le Pere: "The Zuma era has thus been adaptive and continuous in terms of the normative charters which guided his predecessors, with the centre of gravity less concentrated in the Presidency than was the case during the Mbeki years" (Le Pere, 2014: 33).

There are clear signs that under President Zuma’s administration, foreign policy acutely tilted towards countries such as China and Russia. At the same time, foreign policy was in thrall to party rhetoric at Luthuli House—the headquarters of the ANC. Accordingly, as a signal of where greater priority in diplomatic relations was gravitating, the ANC cemented its party-to-party relations despite its right-leaning credentials with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia as well as the Communist Party of China.

If it were not for the absence of the strategic signifiers of the pillars of its foreign policy, especially from a commercial point of view, South Africa’s diversification of its foreign relations to privilege China would be understandable. No country today can afford to ignore China’s economic weight and the imperative of deepening trade and investment links with this behemoth. As one edition of The Economist newspaper points out: “All countries struggle to balance principles and national interests. Yet, South Africa’s revolutionary foreign policy [under Zuma] serves neither" (ibid.).

The danger for South Africa in cultivating closeness with China and Russia is that its foreign policy could well be subsumed under the geo-political and commercial interests of the two big powers. Yet, beyond scepticism towards the West, there is no shared normative agenda between South Africa and these countries. South Africa needs to fashion a relationship based on a clear view of its (strategic) economic interests and leverage these to advance its own position in various global processes. This continues to be vague in as much as South Africa has not had a domestic security and economic framework to pertinently inform its foreign policy goals.

The emphasis on party-to-party relations between the ANC and the ruling parties of China and Russia under Zuma did not bode well for the pursuit of pragmatic relations that could avoid mediation by narrow party or personal interests. Russia and the symbolism of a right-leaning party, United Russia, presided over by strongman Vladimir Putin, stands in great contrast to the historical virtues of a governing ANC which professes to be a social democratic party or a party situated on the broad left. Except for memories of a history that no longer holds, when the communist Soviet Union (USSR) offered the ANC moral and material support during thr ee decades of exile, there are no threads of ideological principle to bind the two countries. Today’s Russia is a fundamentally different reality than that which existed during the Cold War.

There is a sense that the motivation of Zuma’s administration in choosing new diplomatic friends had less to do with South Africa’s collective interests or even ideology than with enhancing the welfare of the ruling party. The establishment of party-to-party relations between the ANC and United Russia in October 2013, as well as between the ANC and the Chinese Communist Party, were not based on any obvious sense of normative convergence.

South Africa cultivated a relationship of subservience and pandered to Russia’s commercial interests from 2012 and 2015. This pertained to Zuma’s manoeuvres to procure Russia’s nuclear technology with no accountability to the public. The

South Africa 's foreign policy under Zuma 63 attempt meant that procurement bypassed the sacrosanct procurement rales of the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA). The highly secretive nature of the agreement between South Africa and the Russians raised disquiet within South Africa, with concerns that procurement procedures were being circumvented to give the Russians a front-run advantage vis-à-vis other potential contenders. The push for this commercial agreement had no rational basis: the country’s National Planning Commission was cautious about going nuclear. Since the revised Integrated Resource Plan 2010-2030 that would guide the country’s energy needs and the balance between various energy inputs had not been finalised, there was at the time no guiding policy framework in place.

Another stark example of unprincipled pragmatism to show up South Africa’s declining moral authority under Zuma was in respect of the Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir and his attendance of the AU Summit in South Africa in June 2015.

A signatory to the Rome Statute of the ICC, South Africa was obligated to arrest Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and genocide committed in Sudan between 2003 and 2005. The ICC had issued a warrant of arrest for al-Bashir in 2009 and 2010. Article 86 of the Statute obligates states to “cooperate fully with the court in its investigation and prosecution". South Africa’s nonarrest of al-Bashir was a violation of this Article as well as its own constitution.

In 2002, the South African parliament passed the Implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Act 27, which effectively domesticated the ICC legal instrument in line with the country’s own, making this international agreement binding on South Africa. South African NGO, the South African Litigation Centre, brought an urgent application before the North Gauteng High Court to petition it to compel the South African government to arrest al-Bashir.

Upon hearing the matter, the court prohibited al-Bashir from leaving South Africa until this case was to be fully heard and settled. A day later, in defiance of the court, the South African government facilitated al-Bashir’s passage out of the country. Subsequently, the ruling ANC made threats that it could call on the government to withdraw from the ICC. Three months after government defied the courts, Zuma met with al-Bashir on the sidelines of victory celebrations in China and committed to strengthening ties. Yet at the time, the matter of al-Bashir‘s escape out of South Africa and the government’s defiance of the courts was still to be settled in court.

Zuma was not an institutionalist leader in the way that his predecessors were. With the judiciary having come under attack several times from the ruling party, his leadership did not exhibit any deep commitment to constitutional principles. In international relations he far preferred informal relationships to those mediated by the strictures of institutions and formal codes. His language of diplomacy converged with non-Western, kleptocratic and state-capitalist countries. It explained why he was keen to shift South African foreign policy priorities in the direction of cultivating stronger ties with countries such as China and Russia. Zuma and the ANC used the anti-imperialist cloak in order to mask what was its declining moral authority in South Africa’s foreign policy. Taking an anti-Western stance and preferring one-sided alignment with China and Russia, however, constrained

South Africa’s options in international relations. This made South Africa vulnerable to being used to further the interests of these countries.