NEWS & ANALYSIS

Zuma, the Congo and the CAR

Isaac Mogotsi asks what is driving our "domestic" president's efforts to involve us in central Africa

"The most practical and important thing about a man is his view of the universe." - G.K. Chesterton.

INTRODUCTION: FRAMING SA DEBATE ON CENTRAL AFRICA.

In a powerful passage infused with great literary pathos and redolent of crude colonial racism, Marlow, the fictional character in Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness", evidently gripped by both animated curiosity and a dark sense of foreboding about the unknown mysteries of Africa unfolding before his jaundiced eyes, shares this captivating piece of imaginary ethnology about the peoples of central Africa, as he journeyed alone up the mighty Congo river, and observing them from the safe distance of his boat, not yet daring to be a heartbeat away from them:

"They howled and leapt and spun and made horrid faces; but what thrilled me was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar."

To this day, there are many Marlows from across the shores of Africa, who remain "thrilled" at the thought of their "remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar" that is in fact central Africa's wretched of the earth.

But like Marlow, these uninvited and self-imposing visitors from across the shores of Africa soon revert to the safe comfort of their metropolis when the going gets really tough, like during the genocide in Rwanda, leaving the region more wretched and much more poorer than they found it.

This has been the story of central Africa, the rhythm and cycle of its time set in motion by the Belgian King Leopold II, who committed Africa's first biblical-scale genocide in the Congo, leaving no less than 10 million inhabitants of central Africa slaughtered, and many more maimed and disfigured.

Yet central Africa has hardly known peace since the end of colonialism..

It is into this volatile, highly armed, highly internationalised and profoundly hardy region of central Africa that SA president Jacob Zuma's government has evidently resolved to deploy our military asserts and to project our hard power, in pursuit of the stated noble goals of conflict prevention and resolution, peace-keeping and conflict mediation, as well as the creation of the conducive environment for the development and prosperity of the region.

 How does one make sense of this decision of President Jacob Zuma to project hard power in central Africa?

The latest flurry of diplomatic activities on the part of SA President Jacob Zuma regarding his attendance of summits of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) on the Central African Republic (CAR)'s political and governance crisis, makes it abundantly clear that the South African government has resolved to earmark central Africa as our Africa policy's new meta-SADC strategic frontier and a key area for the deployment of our hard power.

Is it a wise and prudent decision on the part of our government? What are the factors and motives which drove such a decision? What are the risks and dangers that inhere in such an audacious foreign policy initiative? What are the opportunities and benefits attendant to such a daring decision?

 In my Politicsweb article entitled "On Dlamini-Zuma's candidacy for the AU chairmanship", which appeared on 15 March 2012, I stated that under Jacob Zuma there was "the crucial start of the "Second Transition" in SA's foreign policy and diplomatic practice. From now on, it will be less the ‘Vision Thing' (which characterized the SA Presidency of  Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki), and more and more the implementation phase in our foreign policy and diplomatic practice."

In central Africa, a region that includes member states of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), that "implementation phase" moment is now upon us.

But is President Jacob Zuma going about it the right way?

In its thoughtful editorial of 02 May 2013, under the title "The Zuma doctrine", the Pretoria News interrogated this new challenge before SA's Africa policy. It is worth quoting the editorial at some length, as it masterfully set out the central Africa policy conundrum for the Zuma administration:

"President Jacob Zuma has embarked on a much more ambitious and assertive Africa policy than his ANC predecessors. First he campaigned aggressively and successfully for South Africa to occupy the chair of the African Union Commission last year. Now he is using South African troops much more aggressively, ostensibly in pursuit of the goal of stabilising and democratising Africa...Zuma is moving South Africa into a quite radical Africa policy, almost by stealth, without properly consulting Parliament or the public about what it means and what it will cost, in blood and treasure. He should start an intense indaba with the country before he puts any more soldiers in harm's way."

Could it be true that President Zuma's government has embarked on "a quite radical Africa policy, almost by stealth", without adequate consultation with our Parliament and SA broader publics at large? If so, what would be the implication, and possibly even the imprecation, of such a radical Africa policy shift, "almost by stealth", initiated by President Zuma?

Unless talk about Zuma's new radical, hard-nosed assertive Africa policy is all hogwash and a diplomatic hocus-pocus, we are all enjoined to enter the national debate in earnest as recommended by the Pretoria News, which should seek to provide some of the answers to such a pivotal question of our time.

In doing so, we should leave our emotions, half-baked notions, prejudices and misconceptions about central Africa at the doorsteps of such an important national "indaba".

In this regard, it would be helpful to remember what the foremost US diplomatic theorist and commentator, Walter Lippmann once wrote:

"Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs."

Against this background, can we be reassured about SA policy to CAR and Eastern Congo?

This "controlling principle" must constitute SA foreign policy's bedrock and touchstone in our engagement with, and for our new "radical" Africa policy towards central Africa. It should be the guiding principle for our entire post-1994 foreign policy conceptualisation and practice abroad, if we are to rule out sorry adventurism, subjectivism and voluntarism in the conduct and execution of our external policy.

If we disregard this "controlling principle", we run the real risk of over-stretching ourselves and over-extending our resources in central Africa for vainglorious national ambitions. We also run the risk of setting nice-sounding, emollient but unrealistic and unattainable aims and objectives for our central Africa policy.

It will serve us well as well to heed Ted Galen Carpenter's words  regarding the need to draw "basic distinctions among vital interests, secondary interests; and peripheral interests and irrelevant matters", in the conduct of our external policy.

A lack of such a clear and focused hierarchy of interests in our policy to central Africa can turn SA, to quote Carpenter again, into "...Aunt Myrtle" of Africa, "- a busybody who insists in meddling in everyone else' affairs, often for trivial reasons, citing far-fetched security justification for doing so." ("Washington's Foreign-Policy Hypochondria", The National Interest Online, 25 July 2011).

Such "Aunt Myrtle" of Africa, "a busybody", is sure as sunrise to quickly alienate central African states and peoples, and become everybody's Aunt Sally - a scapegoat that gets blamed and pilloried by everybody else for the historical and present-day travails and gargantuan failures of this region.

Central Africa would then become the byword for South Africa's foreign policy bugbear, in the way Vietnam has become for US foreign policy.

To escape such a stereotypical trap, our policy should be highly impactful, strategic, deliberative, focused, effective, well informed, transparent and transformative. Above all, it should be consultative.

The Pretoria News editorial (ibid) pointedly warned about the attractiveness of the temptation (for SA) to try to stop the mutinies, rebellions, and coups which still plague Africa and retard its development, certainly a worthy cause in and of itself, as the editorial succinctly put it.

Yet a grand policy miscalculation on our government's part in this regard, driven by a nebulous, albeit good-intentioned Samaritan activism, or our misguided Ubuntu-Buntu loose chatter, can trap us in a central African quagmire of our own making. A costly misreading of the real dynamics and balance of power in the conflict-ridden and unstable areas of ECCAS and Eastern Congo, can prove not just disruptive, but can also considerably undo SA's standing and prestige in the rest of Africa, and within the international community in general.

Such a costly foreign policy blunder can even imperil our national cohesion, putting at risk our own domestic peace and stability.

Walter Lippmann put this possibility cogently thus:

"For when a people is divided within itself about the conduct of its foreign relations, it is unable to agree on the determination of true interest. It is unable to prepare adequately for war or to safeguard successfully its peace."

Such a nation becomes a house divided.

As broad and durable a national SA consensus on our military intervention in central African conflicts as possible is the prerequisite for the sustainability and success of such a policy. Such an outcome  will strengthen our national pride in our foreign policy, contribute to our shared national identity and goals, and provide a new source for our renewed national power and vibrancy.

It will be good for SA Inc in the rest of Africa and beyond.

It cannot be over-emphasized just how high the stakes truly are for SA in terms of its military involvement in central African conflicts.

But South Africans can take some solace in the Sowetan article of 02 May 2013 entitled "SA is our only hope". The article quoted Pascal Koyagbele, the CAR general secretary of the farm workers' union, L'association des Paysans Centrafricains, saying that "South Africa is our only hope for survival."

We can only hope he was reflecting the view of the majority of the peoples of central Africa, and specifically of CAR.

Is his a lone voice in the wilderness of central Africa? Is Pascal Koyagbele a silhouette in the twilight of central Africa's difficult transition from post-colonial instability and wars, to a promising future of a more stable and prosperous existence?

Or is it that the gulf between the hope of Pascal Koyagbele and our nation's collective dream for central Africa, on the one hand, and the difficult reality on the ground in central Africa, on the other hand, is insurmountable?

Or, as T.S. Elliot put it:

"Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow

"Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow"? (Poem, "The hollow men").

When it comes to these matters of war and peace involving SA troops abroad, the SA public opinion should demand to co-determine our foreign policy. Nothing less.

Fortunately, in this regard the past whispers softly but incessantly into the ear of the present and the future, a whisper we dare not ignore.

In his SA Sunday Times article under the title "Platitudes will not ease our concern over CAR mission", which appeared on 31 March 2013, Mondli Makhanya approvingly and extensively quotes "a senior British military man". This unnamed British military man makes interesting observations about, amongst other things, the UK public's strong opposition to the UK government's participation in the US-led Iraq war in March/April 2003.

Makhanya went to write the following about the "British military man":

"Every time he went home and interacted with friends, relatives and associates, he would be met with the same question: 'What the heck are we doing over there?'

"More disheartening was that his men would experience the same thing back home. This had a massive demoralising effect and the top brass had to put extra effort into motivating them. As he explained, it was a tall order to convince soldiers that they were fighting for their country when most citizens not only didn't appreciate their mission, but actually opposed it."

Our SANDF troops serving our government and country in central Africa do not deserve such a lousy fate as the British military officers faced over the UK's involvement in the unpopular Iraq war, as eloquently told by Mondli Makhanya.

They deserve a much better deal from our democratic government, which was at the forefront of the world's opposition to the illegal US/UK deceitful war of choice against Iraq..

So we cannot stop to demand assurances from President Zuma and his government that they are not about to perpetrate a Tony Blair on our SANDF troops in central Africa, getting them to fight highly unpopular wars that lack legitimacy, wars that are not grounded in truth and ethical conduct, which enjoy no popular support back home, for diplomatic and military ends that are inscrutable, controversial and disingenuous, on behalf of some unnamed powerful external forces, and not in the interest of the AU and Africa's own Renaissance.

CENTRAL AFRICA'S CONUNDRUM - SO NEAR, YET SO FAR.

The ongoing local and international fascination with SA's stated policy to central Africa derives from the fact that currently central Africa looks like the only African region where circumstances are conspiring to impel South Africa to project, in the main, hard, military power, without little in the way of SA's enormous soft power to vitiate and cushion such hard power projection and its effects. It does seem that SA government is prepared, on occasion, to project such hard power even without the mandate of the United Nations (UN), the African Union (AU), the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Our involvement in CAR is a case in point of our apparent gung-ho readiness for such a go-it-alone foreign policy in Africa.

This feature alone distinguishes our policy towards central Africa from anything else SA has done within the SADC region and for UN peacekeeping missions since 1994, our military intervention in Lesotho including.

Thus, inevitably, discussion about our policy to central Africa under President Zuma becomes a proxy discussion about SA's use of its National Defence Force (SANDF) to advance its African agenda through hard power.

The absence, even now, of SA in-situ diplomatic presence in Bangui is perhaps the best illustration of this point about President Zuma's preference for hard power over soft power when dealing with central Africa. In light of the recent fire-fight between the SANDF troops and the Seleka rebels, it is clear that our soft power and hard power abroad should always be in tandem, in sync and ad idem, and not the latter streaking ahead of the former.   In an article which appeared in the April 2013 issue of the African Report, Uganda President Yoweri Museveni is quoted as bitterly bemoaning that after 50 years of independence from colonialism, some African armies are still not able to defend their territory, which is the pull factor for SA's military involvement in African hotspots.

Yet the reality is that since at least the time of the guerrilla campaign of Museveni's own National Resistance Movement (NRM) against the incumbent Ugandan government in 1986, rebel movements across central Africa have proven more powerful, more resilient and generally more successful than corrupt incumbent governments' armies and security apparatus. It came as no surprise that Museveni himself, his very capable army notwithstanding, later struggled for decades to dislodge, vanquish and extinguish the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA)'s inhuman rebellion in northern Uganda, succeeding only to chase away and export the rump of this vicious outfit into western Sudan and CAR.

This resilience of rebel movements in the region is a lesson SA's policy makers ignored in CAR, and dare not ignore again in Eastern Congo.

Especially in the Eastern Congo. It is clear that the M23 rebel movement, which SA troops will most probably engage in battle in about a month, is much more powerful and better equipped than the DRC's own decrepit, demoralized and highly ineffective Congolese excuse for a standing army, which effectively has lost control over the vast territory of Eastern Congo. Not long ago, Laurent Kabila's rebel movement proved too powerful for Mobuto Sese Seko's much-hated kleptocracy. Earlier, the rebels led by then Congo-Brazaville's (former and again incumbent) president Denis Sassou Nguesso overthrew that country's democratically elected government. In 1994, following the genocide, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (PRF) of Paul Kagame overthrew a Hutu-led. government in Kigali.

In the west of Sudan, there are powerful and colorful rebel movements fighting for Darfur against Khartoum's writ and making steady progress to attain their political goals. Burundi was saved from total collapse induced by an armed rebellion against the incumbent governments, thanks, ironically, to Jacob Zuma-led peace-making there. Angola has just come out of one of Africa's longest, bitterest, and most destructive Cold War-era civil wars, with the incumbent MPLA government surviving the civil war trauma by a whisker.

The Eastern Congo remains a powderkeg of multiplicity of competing and confusing rebel movements, some Tutsi-led, others Hutu-led, yet others native Congolese-led, and yet several others mushroom and pop out all over the place like tumors, a dozen for a dime, and which make Syria's rebel landscape look like a nursery play-game. (See my Politicsweb article "Syria is not Libya", which appeared on 13 February 2012).

There are credible estimates that central Africa is home to no less 35 active rebel movements which are advancing one cause or another, their agenda often colliding, intersecting with or negating one another.

It is as easy to form a rebel movement in central Africa as it is to own a SIM card in South Africa.

This is the intimidating layout of the formidable rebel landscape of central Africa, in which SANDF may become as permanent a feature as the Congo river itself.

In a real and important sense, central Africa has been a witness to continuous warfare since the end of colonialism in the early 1960s. It is without any doubt Africa's most battle-hardened and blood-soaked region. For the most part, it is a huge graveyard to millions of its innocent African victims of wars.

But it is also a region that will not just fold and roll over at the mere mention of Nandos chicken--munching SANDF troops and at the sound of a Zulu township twang.

Central Africa can easily become the burial ground of South Africa's great power ambition and our African Renaissance idealism. It could very much become SA's own Vietnam, if approached with indecent, masculine haste and with unthinking and blinkered military masochism and braggadocio.

After all, this is the same African region where, according to Jendayi Frazer, the former US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa under President George W Bush, Africa's "First World War" erupted and was fought, drawing in the big armies of Zimbabwe, Namibia, Anglola and the DRC, on the one hand, against the formidable armies of Uganda and Rwwanda, and the powerful Tutsi-led rebel movements of Eastern Congo, on the other hand, over the loyalties of Laurent Kabila's new Congo government in Kinshasa.

Will the region host Africa's "Second World War" soon, in which South Africa will be a key protagonist this time around?

Often enough Eastern Congo appears like Dante-sque hell, where it seems Africa's most damned are made to suffer hell's hottest fires; a frightening vision of hell on earth made all the more surreal by the occasional eruption of Goma's angry volcano, like Lucifer reincarnated, whose flowing hot lava lick whole villages and gaggles of terrified and fleeing Congolese in its downward path.

It is very dangerous, in the circumstances, to make a dash for it, in terms of SA's military intervention in central Africa, "half-cocked... and unclear", as the Pretoria News editorial (ibid) put it.

Nevertheless, the case for SA's military and diplomatic intervention in the region is self-evident and compelling enough. No doubt about that.

The question is whether we are prepared enough for the engagement.

Central Africa is of vital national and geo-strategic interest to South Africa. It is not irrelevant to SA's foreign policy objectives. It is not marginal to our Africa policy. It is not secondary to our Africa Renaissance agenda. It is not tangential to our global standing and prestige. It is not insignificant to how the world forms its perceptions about South Africa and the rest of Africa. If anything, it is, in fact, in more ways than one, tied to SA's well-being and internal serenity. Central Africa is enormously strategic to our "Africa Rising" long-term vision. It is to SA what the Russians would call "our Near Abroad." It is the region that borders important, big and pivotal SADC countries like the DRC, Tanzania, and Angola. SANDF peace-keeping forces are already doing duty in central African areas of Burundi, Eastern Congo and Sudan's Darfur.

And not least, central Africa, remarkably, is also the home to some of Africa's greatest economic success stories of the last decade, and an intrinsic   part of the observable, uplifting phenomenon of, as The Economist recently put it,  "Africa Rising." The economies of Equitorial Guinea, Angola, Rwanda, DRC, South Sudan, Sao Tome and Principe, Gabon and even Burundi, are amongst the fastest growing in the world, some even growing faster than China, albeit from a much lower base. The region is also home to some of Africa's most entrenched and durable ruling family elites, be it Dos Santos in Angola, or Bongo in Gabon, or Biya in Cameroon, or Idriss Deby in Chad. It is home also to some of the world's most battle-tested, hardened, experienced and enduring army formations. It is a region awash with weaponry and child soldiers. It hosted Africa's first post-colonial genocide.

Central Africa today is reminiscent of post-Soviet Revolution Russia between 1917-1921, when multiple opposing, new and old armies battled against one another, across the huge continental space between Moscow in the west to the east of Siberia.

It took the sustained ruthless brutality and determination of the new Soviet power to suborn these rebellions and armed mutinies. Josef Stalin's ruthlessness and brutality came to the fore during this bloody Soviet period.

What will it take to pacify central Africa?

If SADC is to South Africa what Canada is to US, then central Africa is to South Africa, the AU's economic power-house, what the Balkans are to Germany, European Union's economic power-house. Both regions are to South Africa and Germany, respectively, vital, slightly distant, but challenging neighborhoods.

But because of the region's treasure-trove of natural and human resources, as well as its strategic Africa Renaissance position at the very centre of Africa, South Africa has a greater stake to be involved in Central Africa than Germany would be in the Balkans. Geographically the Balkans are at the tail-end of South-Eastern Europe, whilst central Africa is geographically and geo-strategically the very  heart of Africa.

Africa can simply bot rise with a broken central Africa.

Central Africa is worth South Africa's blood, sweat, tears and toil.

JACOB ZUMA - SA'S ACTION MAN FOR CENTRAL AFRICA?

The best measure of the potential ravages of the near-future use of SA's formidable hard power in central Africa is what our soft power towards central Africa can achieve if rested, to quote Joseph S Nye, [the US professor and the world's master-strategist on the use of state soft power], "primarily on three resources: its culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political value (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having a moral authority)." (Article "What China and Russia Don't Get About Soft Power", Foreign Policy (FP), 29 April 2013).

In this context Joseph Nye provides the reason why generally soft power ennobles and uplifts its wielders and those it is wielded upon, whilst hard power often disfigures and maims those who wield it and those upon whom it is wielded.

This is true of SA's new, radical policy to central Africa as well.

The ANC deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, recently referred flatteringly to his boss, ANC president   Jacob Zuma, as ANC's "Action Man", in relation to Zuma's soft power charm domestically in support of the National Development Plan adopted by his  government.

Will Zuma prove to be also SA's "Action Man", Terminator-like and guns blazing, in therain forests and arid semi-deserts of central Africa?

The new-found confidence on the part of President Jacob Zuma to conduct and execute a much more aggressive, radical, bare-knuckled and robust policy towards central Africa has come as a major surprise, and rude awakening, to many observers of SA government scene, who have for a very long time followed the winding and tortured political career of the son of the Nkandla village in Kwa-Zulu Natal.

On practically all available empirical evidence, this strongman attitude and militarist bombast of Jacob Zuma towards central Africa is really not par for the course.

For the more critical observers, his new, self-assured attitude on military deployment abroad borders on deviant and absent-minded diplomatic and military adventure.

So why is Zuma leaning more and more towards the use of hard power of SANDF as a first , and not last, resort when it comes to resolution of the intractable problems of central Africa? Has Zuma's thinking and political behavior on central Africa been covertly influenced and hardened by the ruthless hard-men of central Africa's politics and military, such as Angola's Dos Santos, Congo-Brazaville's Denis Sassou Nguesso, Chad's Idriss Deby, Rwanda's Paul Kagame, Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, and CAR's Djidouti? These are Africa's hard men who have fought some of post-colonial Africa's most brutish wars, whether within their own countries or through proxies in countries bordering their own. They are all addicts of untrammelled state power. They are arguably Africa's best crop of military strategists. They all abhor, and thus do not brook, any external interference in the domestic affairs of their countries.  Yet they will not hesitate to interfere in the affairs of neighboring countries if and when they feel threatened.

Many in Africa today refer to this crop of Africa's hard men simply as "Africa's New Prussians."

[It is truly one of our age's greatest ironies that in the main, the hard men of central Africa also stand at the helm of the greatest economic turnaround in Africa since the onset of European colonialism over five centuries ago.]

If so, at what price for South Africa's new and hard-fought democracy and much-admired constitutional order?

What has baffled some observers about the new and radical "Zuma doctrine" towards central Africa is that an SA leader who was punted by many of his pre-Polokwane (2007) supporters as a "domestic issues president" has developed such an insatiable appetite for foreign policy, drawn to it like a moth to a burning candle in the dark. President Zuma has morphed effortlessly into a "foreign policy president" regarding central Africa, armed with his "Zuma doctrine.".

He has elevated SA's diplomatic dealings around CAR, and by implication with the central African region's ECCAS, into a strategic presidential project over which he presides within his national Cabinet  setting, and from which he chooses to sideline his own Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Maite Nkoane-Mashabane, and even his own deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe.

This is new, though not refreshing.

It is neither a trivial and immaterial observation to make that President Jacob Zuma is relying almost exclusively on his State Security Minister, Siyabonga Cwele, a leading securocratic hawk and a fierce pro-Zuma ruling party and Cabinet loyalist hailing from Zuma's Kwa-Zulu Natal province; and, to a lesser extent on his rather innocently naïve Defence Minister Nosiviwe Ngcakula, to conduct his "shuttle diplomacy" to central Africa.

This high-profile military and securocratic approach of Zuma to central Africa contrasts sharply with his low-key and junior-level political team for SADC mediation in Zimbabwe, which is a thoroughly political and diplomatic team that includes our Defence Minister's husband and SA diplomat, Charles, Zuma's foreign policy adviser and former diplomat, Lindiwe Zulu, and Zuma's spokesman, Mac Maharaj, none of whom sit on Zuma's national Cabinet.

Does Zuma's perceived deteriorating political outlook domestically have anything to do with his increased presidential assertiveness on our policy towards central Africa? Is he seeking external diversion and distraction in central Africa, far away from the domestic scandals plaguing his presidency almost on a fortnightly basis?

If so, can Zuma's policy towards central Africa escape Mao Tse Tung's so-called "Four Olds"? Namely old habits, old ideas, old custom and old culture.

Will the same shortcomings of President Zuma regarding his domestic performance be refracted onto the central African stage, with all their controversy and divsiveness?

CONCLUSION: IN THE SHADOW OF DREAMS.

In his recent two-parts article in New African magazine of April 2013, Cameron Doudu asks a crucial question in the form of the caption of his article:

"Is West Africa allowing itself to be recolonised?"

The question we in turn should pose to central Africa is:

"is central Africa allowing itself to be recolonised by New Marlows carrying money bags, commanding foreign military bases on the African soil and sabotaging the African Renaissance agenda?"

Is there anything SA can do in this regard? If so should it be through its soft or hard power, or a happy marriage between the two?

Answers to these important questions will define the face of Africa in the next half a century and beyond.

They will define South Africa too.

Isaac Mpho Mogotsi Executive Director, Centre of Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA). He lived for a number of years in East Africa previously. He can be reached on [email protected] and can be followed at: Twitter1.

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