A FAMOUS GROUSE

IN developments that didn’t surprise many opposition politicians, the ANC’s first deputy secretary-general, Nomvula Mokonyane, recently branded the Democratic Alliance “the most dangerous racist organisation” in South Africa. 

The accusation is disappointing. Mokonyane has evidently not been keeping pace with the latest trends in such matters. Had she been paying attention, the comrade first deputy secretary-general would have noticed that, alas, such a charge from the ruling party against its opponents no longer raises much more than a bemused eyebrow these days. 

As a result of flagrant abuse and overuse, the label is meaningless, tired and worn. But, no worries, a more heinous category of transgression is emerging in the arsenal of the world’s aggrieved and offended, and that is “Western perversion”.

Judging by media reports, the term was bandied about with some enthusiasm at the recent BRICS summit. The war criminal Vladimir Putin, for example, put it to good use last Thursday in his closing address to the autocrats who had gathered in Kazan, Russia, for a charmfest intended to portray Moscow as anything but an isolated pariah on the world stage and every bit as powerful a global force as any member of the G7 states.

Praising the summit as a counterbalance to the West’s “perverse methods”, Putin railed away at alleged attempts to stem the burgeoning clout of the Global South through “illegal unilateral sanctions, blatant protectionism, manipulation of currency and stock markets, and relentless foreign influence ostensibly promoting democracy, human rights, and the climate change agenda”.

Everything but the kitchen sink was thrown into this broadside against the liberal democracies, their depravity and boundless underhandedness now in plain sight, according to the Russian leader.

“Such perverse methods and approaches — to put it bluntly — lead to the emergence of new conflicts and the aggravation of old disagreements,” Putin was quoted as saying. “One example of this is Ukraine, which is being used to create critical threats to Russia's security, while ignoring our vital interests, our just concerns, and the infringement of the rights of Russian-speaking people.

Ah … Ukraine. For more than two years now the theatre of an illegal war which Putin has justified as both a legitimate response to the eastward expansion of the Nato defensive pact and a defence of pro-Russian populations in eastern Ukraine.

The war has not gone Moscow’s way. Casualties have been considerable. The Kremlin refuses to release such information, but more than 70 000 Russians who have died in the conflict have been independently identified, according to the BBC. “Every day,” they reported last month, “the names of those killed in Ukraine, their obituaries and photographs from their funerals are published across Russia in the media and on social networks.” The actual toll, though, could be far higher.

Support from the West has prevented a complete Russian takeover of the territory but there are fears that next week’s US presidential election could result in a second term for an unhinged Donald Trump, who is regarded as a Putin ally and less likely to maintain current levels of support for Kyiv.

Sanctions are hurting — not just Russia but other rogue states as well. One of the principal aims of the BRICS summit was to find a “dollar alternative”; Russia has called for a new global payment apparatus, an alternative to the SWIFT bank messaging system, which would enable Moscow to dodge Western sanctions and trade more easily with its partners, some of whom, like Iran and North Korea, are also heavily sanctioned by the West.

As the BRICS delegates noted in a joint declaration, “faster, low-cost, more efficient, transparent, safe and inclusive cross-border payment instruments built upon the principle of minimising trade barriers and non-discriminatory access” would be of enormous benefit to all concerned.

One of these beneficiaries would, of course, be China — which brings us back to the ANC’s first deputy secretary-general and her difficulties with those who have succumbed to Western perversion.

Mokonyane was specifically reacting to the DA and the Inkatha Freedom Party’s intention to petition Cyril Ramaphosa to reverse a demand that Taiwan close down or relocate its liaison office from Pretoria to the centre of Johannesburg. 

The demand, which Taiwan has rejected on the grounds that it is motivated by China’s attempts to further isolate the self-governing island republic, is seen as a violation of a 1997 agreement between Pretoria and Taipei regarding, among other things, the location of their mutual representative offices. 

The two enjoy a strong commercial relationship, and South Africa maintains an office in Taipei. The offices function as de-facto embassies and consulates since the two sides lack formal diplomatic ties, which were cut when Pretoria set out to establish relations with Beijing.

Removing Taiwan’s presence from the capital would accordingly please China; the latter would then be spared the loss of face that no doubt comes with their embassy being just around the corner. 

How galling it must be for diplomats from the People’s Republic to stroll about Hatfield in search of another long lunch and catch a glimpse of these upstarts on their doorstep. No wonder they want them removed, and no wonder that the ANC would eagerly comply with such a demand.

Unfortunately, the DA have reminded the ANC that they no longer enjoy an outright majority in government and, accordingly, are not able to unilaterally adopt foreign policy positions without consulting coalition partners; consensus must be sought in order to renegotiate the terms of the bilateral agreement with Taiwan. 

This has obviously troubled Mokonyane, who has difficulty understanding certain basic fundamentals about a liberal democracy. And, speaking of which, Squirrel’s explanation in Kazan of his government of “national unity” must have greatly amused Putin, who tends to imprison political opponents rather than work with them. In Russia, elections results tend to available before polling day. But we digress.

“Remember,” Mokonyane has said, “the DA has got serious hangovers of separate development. See what they do in the Western Cape. See what they want to do about the constitution in the Western Cape. It’s just because we have a bigger responsibility as the ANC, bigger than any other party in this country, to carry South Africans along. 

“But if there’s one most dangerous racist organisation in this country, it’s the DA that seeks separate development, the noise they are making about Taiwan … It’s in our DNA that any form of separate development, any form of segregation, we can’t actually identify, and that’s the story we agree with, actually it’s overdue, the removal of Taiwan. We will not support what the DA wants, which is to take the people of China back to a bantustan system.”

This is confused gibberish. But there is further confusion elsewhere: the ANC’s “bigger responsibility” has exposed another fault-line in what passes for diplomacy in the GNU, this time over the meeting in Pretoria on Monday between Ukraine foreign minister Andrii Sybiha and his counterpart Ronald Lamola.

It was, by all accounts, a successful visit by the Ukrainian. That is, until Leon Schreiber, the DA home affairs minister, announced that he had signed a diplomatic visa waiver agreement with Sybiha. “We continue to see Ukraine as a valued ally,” Schreirber said, “as a valued friend, who supported us right from the beginning, from the days of our struggle against apartheid, right through to now.” 

Sybiha said much the same thing at the unveiling of a plaque at Pretoria’s Freedom Park to honour the late Hennadiy Udovenko, the Ukrainian diplomat who served as the vice-chairperson of the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid from 1985 to 1992 when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. 

The Presidency now claims that Schreiber was, um, not entitled to sign such a treaty. Consensus hasn’t been reached between coalition partners, it seems. And therein lay hypocrisy. 

Squirrel and his chums, in both Pretoria and Moscow, do bang on to the world at large about Russia’s support for the ANC during the struggle era. That is, a long time ago.

But Ukraine’s support for the liberation movement was just as significant. During the apartheid era, many ANC members had lived in Ukraine and studied there.

One of the many veterans who openly acknowledge this is Tokyo Sexwale. In a recent interview with the London Sunday Times, he told Christina Lamb, the newspaper's chief foreign correspondent: “I studied engineering in Moscow and lived in Moscow and Kyiv when I was training, so it’s a heartache: who do I stand with?”

Who indeed? Such an attitude is perhaps more indicative of moral turpitude than a dilemma. As for the heartache, well, bring on the tiny violins. It’s quite obvious where the ANC stands. As Sexwale told Lamb:

“Chinese and Russians are our friends: we must have that emblazoned in large letters. When the boot was on our heads, why did we end up in Moscow and China? When the ANC was banned in 1960 after 48 years of non-violent struggle, the ANC of Mandela, in whose house we sit, and whose then head, Albert Luthuli, was shortly to become the first African to win the Nobel peace prize, who did we appeal to? The ANC leadership went to the US embassy to plead with the Americans, a former colony, to help us. But they rejected us. We also contacted your prime minister, Macmillan, and said, ‘Please help us’, but no.

“So we took a long road through countries which are not even English-speaking — Cuba, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Russia and China, and they without any hesitation helped us. No one from the West came to our aid till 1990. Your sister Maggie Thatcher called Mandela a terrorist, a man sitting in prison, but eventually it was the Iron Lady who came round to realise the justness of our struggle. So colonial powers right now must be very cautious in teaching us: they are the last people who can lecture us about oppression and who we should make friends with.”

Thus the distortions and half-truths of an ingrate. How strange then that Oliver Tambo and others lived for many years in London, imperial capital of the world, and there did much to draw the West’s attention to the injustices of apartheid. Were they confused about colonialism? Did they not know the way to Moscow? Who knows? 

But all this is very old hat, and fie on nostalgia and what-what. My own suggestion is that, if it’s friends the ailing ANC now so desperately needs, then perhaps they should suck up to Western perverts rather than the tyrants and neo-colonialists in Beijing and Moscow. History may yet prove me right on this one.