Remarks by Tony Leon to the Cape Town Press Club, Kelvin Grove Club, Cape Town, October 10 2012

"Home thoughts from Abroad: Reflections of a Returning Accidental Ambassador"

Estamos felices estar volviendo aca, en Ciudad del Cabo, nuestro casa. Hoy es mi primer discurso publico en Sudafrica desde llegar hace diez dias.

You will gather that my three years away from here in South America led to the acquisition of some basic Spanish! 

I am the proverbial poacher turned gamekeeper - having spent twenty years in the frontline of opposition politics in South Africa, I have just returned from three years as Head of Mission and Ambassador to Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. I was recently told of the time when NASA at Cape Kennedy launched a rocket which misfired: it was immediately named "civil servant", since it didn't work and could never be fired!

Further on this theme, John Kenneth Galbraith, the distinguished Harvard historian was like me an ‘accidental ambassador'. After serving as President Kennedy's envoy to India in the 1960s, he recounts in his memoir, how so many members of the diplomatic corps back then in New Delhi were ‘a spectacular example of what economists call ‘disguised unemployment'.''

Without being either self-referring or self-congratulatory, I ended my mission last weekend on the note that properly conceived and executed, the diplomatic post to which I was assigned by President Zuma in 2009 constituted for me a high honour . Indeed to paraphrase the title of Condoleezza Rice's recent biography , there is "No Higher Honour" than being able to serve my country and advance our agenda in one of the most challenging and exciting places on earth, the southern cone of South America.

That I was able to do so in the company and with the active collaboration of seven South Africans, who with me were a veritable and happy micro-version of our rainbow nation, in the Embassy of South Africa in Buenos Aires, was a real bonus. These men and women are engaged, honest and inspiring civil servants and prove that in a sea of state dysfunctionality, there are indeed individual centres of excellence.

Serving their country and looking after its citizens, individual and corporate, together with the excellent Argentines in our Mission there, was for Michal and me an inspiring and life-changing experience. I hope that I managed to walk the path which I previously talked about in Parliament: that you can serve the national interests of your country from  either side of the political aisle and that you can (indeed must) work with domestic opponents from home to serve the interests of South Africa abroad.

However, since I believe that you had to pay good money in our ever depreciating currency to attend today's lunch; I don't simply want to conform to the definition of an Ambassador coined by a colleague in Buenos Aires, former Indian Ambassador "Vish' Viswanathan, who memorably said "the job of an ambassador is to think twice before he says nothing!"

There were two brackets around my ambassadorship: South Africa's hosting of the 2010 FIFA Football World Cup and the Marikana Lonmin mine massacre.  The opening bracket for my diplomatic career commenced on the eve of one of the finest pinnacles of our national achievement and international acclamation, the global football fest. The closing bracket which coincided with my departure was the deep precipice of the recent events around Rustenberg, the shock waves from which we will feel for many years to come.

Both events, in the light and darkness which they cast on our country and its projection in the world, encapsulate South African reality at its best and worst; the limitless potential of our best achievement on the one hand, and our confining failure to address the complexity of our socio-economic reality, on the other-the alpha and the omega of life in South Africa. 

Of course in the ideal world and country we would all like to inhabit, there would only be the joyful sounds of Vuvuzelas at football matches and not the lamentations of grieving mourners at mass funerals. But in the real world and country we live in we have to deal with both, and work toward the day and age when the frequency of the former outplays and outlasts the latter.

My three year stay in Argentina form which Michal and I have just so recently returned is actually the third and longest spell which I have spent outside South Africa. And despite my deep appreciation for the fantastic steaks of Buenos Aires, the incredible warmth and embrace of the Argentine people and the diversity and richness of our experiences in the land of Evita and the Gaucho, I have returned home with a renewed appreciation for South Africa, despite the complexity of its problems and challenges. The unnamed French philosopher was onto something when he opined, "If you want to appreciate your own country, go and live in another."

But before I touch on ‘my home thoughts form abroad', permit me to give you two takeaways  I learned from my previous sojourns in the other part of the Americas, the USA where I enjoyed two fellowships in diametrically (ideologically at least)  opposite settings.

The first was at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 2007. There in a galaxy of academic stars, one of the brightest I met was Professor Joseph Nye.  He defined a nation's "smart power" as being the right combination between its "hard power "(its trading assets, military hardware and strategic endowments) and its "soft power" (its cultural assets, social values and political example).

From rugby to football and importing opera stars (Pretty Yende and Given Nkosi), to arranging political debates between FW De Klerk and Mac Maharaj, to bringing across the Springbok Rugby legends to play the Pumas Classicos, to hosting the Mandela Photo Exhibition from the Apartheid Museum to translating the Mike Van Graan play "Green Man Flashing" into Spanish -our Embassy in Buenos Aires certainly used the entire toolkit of public diplomacy to make South Africa, at its diverse best and most brilliant, known and appreciated in Argentina.

In fact, on the tourism figures alone, we can trace a direct link in the surge of Argentine arrivals in South Africa, which increased by over 100% during my tenure, to the huge exposure South Africa received from our hosing of the FIFA World Cup in 2010. That was, in an appropriate phrase, a real and positive ‘game changer'. So Argentina today is one of five new countries on the global ‘watch list' of SA Tourism.

On the issue and meaning of ‘hard power' in 2008 I was a visiting fellow at the Cato Center in Washington DC. This economically liberal, in fact libertarian , think tank was far more the preferred habitat for the exemplars of hard power in the US, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, than it was a home for the soft power exponents such as Professor Nye.

Yet, a few years before I was in residence, Dick Cheney at Cato made an influential speech which in many ways underscored the dichotomy of Professor Nye. This is what Cheney, a former CEO of the natural resource giant Haliburton, said at Cato in 1998:

"The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where one would not normally choose to go. But we go to where the business is."

What Cheney said in his plain-speaking way is that if your country possesses valued commodities and resources, you possess an advantage over other countries who, in the words of the famous car hire advert have ‘to try harder', to attract investment and make their way in the hyper competitive and instantly connected world of today. But equally, if you squander every natural advantage and inheritance which you are fortunate to be bequeathed by nature and geography, then often you can destroy better than you know or might realize.

I have spent much of the past three years thinking deeply about the considerable similarities linking my own country of South Africa to my host country of Argentina. As I wrote in the Financial Times  (08.10.12) there are eerie parallels . Both have resource rich economies of the same size ($400bn); both have almost the same geo-strategic location on either side of the South Atlantic and are members of the G 20; both have overcome oppressive and authoritarian governments and have replaced them with democratically elected governments both of which have populist elements  in them and a tendency to centralize power; finally and more balefully both our countries only last week -despite our sporting prowess'- were bundled out of the Rugby Championship. More ominously, we also the week before received yellow cards and credit downgrades from the rating agency, Moody's.

We can lament the bad politics in the one country and the eccentric economics in the other and sometimes the combination of both in both places. But we can also seek to build  anew on the natural foundations of bounteous advantage which history, geography and human endeavour has gifted to us.

I prefer the latter approach, since it admits of a positive and more hopeful future outcome. But without purposeful leadership and the engagement of our whole society, South Africa will be doomed to be remembered as a golden footnote in the history books of past times, just as so many in the country I have just left remember through the lens of nostalgia the time, in around 1930, when Argentina was one of the ten richest countries on the face of the earth.

When my Embassy colleagues and I were working out a trade and export strategy to promote South Africa's selling points as a destination for investment and as an exporter of value, we ruthlessly promoted our key assets and advantages. In this we were assisted the department of trade and industry and hugely advantaged by the presence in Argentina of some key SA -originating multinationals (Standard Bank, Naspers, AngloGold Ashanti and SABMiller) and hindered by the fact that Argentina is one of the most protectionist countries on earth. Because of these advantages and despite the obstacles, last year we managed to increase SA exports there by over 80% to reach a record high of R 1.3 bn.

Simultaneously we attracted some significant investors from the Argentine agri -sector, including one tranche of R100m into the Eastern Cape. So what then are the unique selling points of South Africa and its ‘smart power' advantages which help to make the sale and how secure and entrenched are these assets going forward? Here is a very brief list of the plus factors and some of the negatives currently threatening them:

South Africa has four unique selling points which cannot be easily replicated elsewhere in the world: our mineral pre-eminence especially in platinum and platinum group products; our unique tourism diversity, especially the combination of the majestic beauty and sophistication  of Cape Town and the rugged  allure of our game reserves ; our geo-strategic location midpoint between South America and Asia -both home to the most dynamic markets in the emerging world, underlined by the fact that some 70% of SAA inward bound passengers from Brazil and Argentina are en route to an Asian destination; the extraordinary example of our constitutional settlement and the power of our negotiated settlement and the icons who created it as a mighty add-on of cultural and political significance.

You will readily see from this list that certain current dangers and lurking future threats can upend or destroy some, perhaps not all, the items on our national menu of universal uniqueness.

The second list is not unique to South Africa, but our continued holding of these assets makes us a competitive ‘'sell'' in a highly competitive world and especially attractive in places, such as my recent host countries where, critically, some of these key elements are either missing or under threat: these include  South Africa's market access to Europe, Middle East and the United States, augmented by bilateral  and unilateral (such as AGOA) trade agreements and investment protection treaties; Rule of Law certainty and constitutional protections of property and investment .

You will also see that every element on this list is currently either under review or even in some danger. It is perhaps ironic, that Minister Rob Davies with whom I happily and energetically co-operated in selling South Africa in South America and whose department has some seriously outstanding trade officers in our embassies abroad, is discarding the bilateral investment treaties with some of our European partners, the existence and continuance of which add  such value  to our investment  toolkit!

On the constitution and the threats to it, I need hardly elaborate on these to an audience of today's distinction. Perhaps I can offer only one observation, drawn more form my previous life than my current incarnation. The other day -despite originating from what my friend Sue Vos calls stoneage.com - in my new guise as a Twitterer (@TonyLeonSA) I noted in the obligatory 140 characters, "if  our constitution is so good, why do things seem so bad?"

My non -tweeted answer is that our constitution, in which I had a small hand in helping to write back in the 1990s, is no panacea; it is no holy grail, simply a set of arrangements and rules of the road for the never ending journey toward democracy. Crucially, our constitution is better than the alternative of not having one at all. However, I am not sure that we can really establish a real and competitive constitutional democracy (and the first adjective is conditioned by the second) on the back of election results where the majority party, over four elections in eighteen years, receives more than 60% of the votes.

In Argentina the President last year was elected with just 54% of the vote, but the next party candidate, in a fragmented and uninspiring opposition field, recorded just 17%, a huge, but better, spread than the difference in South Africa's last election.

Huge majorities do not encourage constitutional caution, something we can observe in both countries. In both countries as well, sometimes the finer detail and often the motivating spirit of the constitutions are ignored for the simple reason that they can be. More completive politics will obviously change behaviour and that too is a task for the opposition forces in both places to address.

Finally, one of the great privileges of my previous perch in Buenos Aires, and the one before that in our parliament, was the opportunity to engage with some truly remarkable people from across the world. Of all the outsize figures I have met in both places one of the more memorable is former US President Bill Clinton. Before I attended a dinner with him recently in Buenos Aires, I was finishing a chapter of my new book on my adventures in diplomacy which I have entitled "The Accidental Ambassador".

Given the reverence which Argentines still attach to the late Eva Peron (who died 60 years ago) and her late husband President Juan Domingo Peron I decided to call the section on Argentine politics, I hope accurately and not unkindly, "Vote for a Better Yesterday".  And then I heard Clinton speak and he said something that night which is so profoundly simple and true: "You know the only way for countries and people to succeed and prosper is to stay in the future business."

My hope on my homecoming is that South Africa will continue to honour its past and learn from it, but will remain resolutely in the ‘future business.' It's the only place for a winning nation to be.

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