Scandal Erupts In South African Government Over Putin
1- 29.10.2024, 13:57
- 9,144
The country's president is being criticized for his trip to Russia.
Relations with Vladimir Putin have caused a split in the South African government. President Cyril Ramaphosa's main partner in the ruling coalition has refused to consider Putin, who started the war, a friend and ally of South Africa.
Disputes over three of the most pressing foreign policy issues – Russia, Israel and China – have revealed deep ideological differences between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Democratic Alliance (DA), with which the ANC was forced to enter into a coalition after failing to secure a majority in the May elections for the first time in 30 years since the end of apartheid, the Financial Times reports.
They have also raised concerns that the coalition, which consists of a total of 10 parties, will not last the required five years.
"At the BRICS summit in Kazan, Ramaphosa, who also leads the ANC, called Putin a “valued ally” and “precious friend” of South Africa. The DA leader and Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen reacted sharply to the comments. Putin may be Ramaphosa’s friend, but he is not a friend of South Africa’s “authoritarian regime, which is currently violating international law by waging an imperialist war of conquest against a sovereign state,” Steenhuisen said.
Vincent Magwenya, Ramaphosa’s spokesman, responded by saying Stenhuysen was trying to “petty-manage the president,” who has maintained good relations with Moscow since the apartheid era, when the Soviet Union trained and armed the ANC.
“If Ramaphosa wants to be friends with an imperialist warmonger like Putin, that’s his business,” said Emma Powell, the DA’s international affairs spokesperson. But with the ANC winning only 40.2% of the vote, it has no right to make policy statements on behalf of the government without first reaching an agreement with its coalition partners, she said: consensus is needed “so that we can consistently pursue a policy of non-alignment.”
Ramaphosa has already been accused of double standards, as in 2022 his government failed to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, citing its traditional policy of non-alignment, but in January 2024 South Africa went to the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
And in October the government ordered Taiwan to move its diplomatic mission from Pretoria, where all embassies are located, to Johannesburg, where the trade missions are based. The DA accused the ANC of pandering to another of its long-standing partners, China.
The South African government is turning to “a revolutionary mythology” in its foreign policy “not on democratic achievements or our own principles that we agreed on in the transition [from apartheid],” laments Greg Mills of the Brenthurst Foundation think tank:
South Africa has never allowed impartiality to influence its foreign policy, nor human rights to influence its relations with any kind of authoritarian regime.
The South African government was previously suspected of sending weapons on the Russian vessel Lady R, which is under US sanctions, when it called at a naval base near Cape Town in December 2022. Although the South African government denied this, it took a public statement by the US ambassador to the country about a possible arms shipment to Russia for the government to launch an investigation. In September 2023, Ramaphosa revealed that an independent investigation had found that the weapons had indeed been loaded onto the Lady R, but that they had been destined for the South African Defence Force under a contract dating back to 2018 and that no export permit had been issued.
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