The African National Congress (ANC) is jealously guarding South Africa’s foreign policy, ensuring that other parties in the Government of National Unity (GNU) – particularly the Democratic Alliance (DA) – don’t get a look in, the DA has complained.
The DA says “the ANC and DA see the world through vastly different” lenses, and believes the GNU should reflect those differences. DA leader John Steenhuisen, now the agriculture minister, and other party officials have repeatedly stated that the GNU should have a say in foreign policy.
However, they believe the ANC is stonewalling the DA, evidently insisting on a de facto monopoly on the formation and execution of foreign policy.
This became most evident when the DA’s deputy spokesperson on international relations and cooperation, Ryan Smith, recently wrote to President Cyril Ramaphosa proposing that the Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) for the G20 – which, since the formation of the GNU, includes DA Cabinet ministers Steenhuisen, Siviwe Gwarube, Solly Malatsi and Dion George – should “serve as South Africa’s Government of National Unity foreign policy engine room”.
Smith proposed that the IMC should, in particular, guide SA’s presidency of the G20, which began on 1 December. But the government was having none of that.
President Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, responding to Smith’s letter and to the DA’s wider complaint about being cut out of foreign policymaking, told Daily Maverick: “There’s already an effective and working power-sharing framework within the GNU that covers all the participating parties that have been allocated their respective portfolios.
“Attempts by any party to insert itself into the functions of the President is nothing but overreach. The notion that the President is ‘monopolising’ what is his area of responsibility is totally absurd.”
Read more: SA takes G20 helm amid global political instability and shifting world order
From the start of the GNU, the ANC’s hands-off policy on foreign relations was clear. In several other portfolios where the minister is from the ANC, one deputy is from another party. But in international relations and cooperation, the minister and both deputies are from the ANC.
Shortly after the GNU was formed, the new International Relations and Cooperation Minister, Ronald Lamola, delivered his first foreign policy speech and frankly acknowledged to Daily Maverick that it reflected no changes from the ANC’s pre-GNU foreign policy.
Read more: GNU’s foreign policy mirrors that of the ANC, says new minister Ronald Lamola
DA wants ‘urgent reset’
Emma Powell, the DA’s spokesperson on international relations and cooperation, says: “The Democratic Alliance and the African National Congress view the world through vastly different lenses.
“The ANC have long sought to prioritise the interests of their fraternal allies over our respective nations’ interests. These allies include the likes of Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe, Frelimo in Mozambique, the National Resistance Movement in Uganda, the Chinese Communist Party and United Russia.
“Recently, the ANC-led Dirco expressed solidarity with the Assad regime in Syria, whilst the ministry’s friendship with Tehran and its axis of resistance, the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas, is well established. Media statements issued by the minister and [director-general] since the formation of the GNU continue to highlight the ANC’s ideological inclinations and selective outrage, frequently cloaked in the language of human rights.”
Read more: SA’s ambassador in Damascus sticks to his post despite Pretoria’s defence of Assad
Powell said that the DA approved BRICS as a platform for advancing South-South cooperation and advocating global governance reforms, but warned that the expanding BRICS was increasingly becoming an anti-Western bloc of authoritarian countries. This was antithetical to SA’s values of constitutionalism and democracy, and risked alienating Western allies, with which SA had much stronger economic ties.
Powell also recently condemned Pretoria for ordering Taiwan to close down its “Taipei Liaison Office” in Pretoria and move to Johannesburg. Powell said the SA government had given no explanation for the decision to remove Taiwan’s office from the capital where it had been for 26 years since SA switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. She said it was clear “pressure was being brought to bear on Pretoria by external actors…” – a clear reference to Beijing.
She reiterated the DA’s position that the GNU as a whole should have been involved in any decision on the status of Taiwan’s office.
Read more: Taiwan has representative offices in capitals across the globe, despite what Lamola says
“An urgent reset is required,” she said.
“Cabinet must urgently meet to define South Africa’s national interest in the context of increasing global fractures and destabilisation, noting that the ANC no longer has an outright majority and is therefore not at liberty to unilaterally determine our nation’s foreign policy.”
The DA has largely left it to Powell to articulate its differences with the ANC on foreign policy, though Steenhuisen was provoked into a strong public reaction himself when Ramaphosa met President Vladimir Putin at the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, in October and warmly greeted him as a “valuable ally and a friend”.
Steenhuisen issued a statement saying the DA, “as a key partner in the Government of National Unity, rejects this characterisation in no uncertain terms: “The Democratic Alliance does not consider Russia, or Vladimir Putin, to be an ally of our Nation.”
Steenhuisen said SA “simply cannot afford to make statements that could jeopardise international relations and trade opportunities”, and stressed that foreign policy positions expressed on behalf of the GNU should first be fully and properly debated within the government.
In a later address to the nation on foreign policy, Ramaphosa insisted on the government’s non-aligned policy, saying that in declaring Putin and the people of Russia as “valuable friends and allies”, he was “not projecting any particular country or block of countries as the enemy. Similarly, as a country that has no enemies, South Africa regards the members of BRICS as friends.”
DA concessions
Arguably, to the extent that there has been any convergence in foreign policy under the GNU, the DA has made more concessions. When Steenhuisen himself was in Beijing in September as part of the SA government delegation to the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (Focac), he told a local journalist that the DA backed the one-China policy.
Until now, the DA has followed a two-China policy, giving equal recognition to Beijing and Taipei. However, Daily Maverick understands that the party will soon officially adopt a one-China policy, though DA sources underscore that it will be different from the ANC’s, and more like that of the US and Western powers.
It will stress that if Taiwan and China are ever integrated, this should only be done by peaceful negotiation, not force. And they emphasise too that the DA will continue to maintain good relations with Taiwan.
Last week, some members of the DA were upset that their party voted in Parliament for R95.6-million in additional funding for the SA’s government genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Daily Maverick heard that some Jewish and Christian MPs walked out of Parliament to avoid voting for the budget measure. They also asked why the party could not have allowed DA MPs a conscience vote on this issue.
However, DA national spokesperson Willie Aucamp told Daily Maverick that “although the Democratic Alliance does allow for ‘conscience votes’, we have never done so to approve budgets”.
“The R95-million that was included in the Special Appropriations was for money that has already been spent under the ANC. As a country, we have an obligation to pay our debts, no matter if we agree with the spending or not. The consequences for our credit and credibility would be too serious if we refused to pay our debt. This appropriation was not done for any future spending or the approval of further funds for the court case.”
DA officials have said that although they would not have taken Israel to the ICJ, they are now willing to submit to whatever the court decides.
Conversely, there are few signs of the ANC budging on any foreign policy issues. Last week Ebrahim Rasool, a former ANC Western Cape premier and the incoming ambassador to the US, told Daily Maverick that SA should tone down its “megaphone” diplomacy on Gaza to avoid unnecessarily antagonising US congressional members who are contemplating kicking SA out of the Agoa preferential trade initiative because of its hostility to Israel and friendship with Russia, Iran and China.
But Rasool stressed though that he was in no way proposing that SA drop its ICJ case against Israel. DM