“Imagine”, a Western diplomat from a leading investor nation in South Africa told me recently, “If we had said during the struggle for democracy here, ‘it’s not our business’. And if we had added to this that the future of South Africa cannot be determined by outsiders, least of all by those from the West. There might be terrible violations of human rights in the country, but that is for the government and the people of South Africa to sort out.”
Of course, the ANC in exile in the 1980’s and 1990’s took a radically different view of things. Whatever their limitations on the battlefields and on the frontline states surrounding apartheid South Africa, its diplomatic pressures on the West were hugely effective.
It lobbied successfully for the imposition of sanctions, it persuaded the US Congress to override the presidential veto and introduce the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. It used its international leverage, and moral suasion, to ensure that even the more reluctant economic actors with clout, Britain and West Germany, pressured PW Botha (with little success) and then FW de Klerk (with much greater yield) to introduce the wide sweeping reforms which saw full scale democracy introduced in 1994, and the ANC’s ascent to power.
How sad and ironic then to see its stance today, as the world watches and involves itself in the greatest blight in governance and rights delinquency in the western hemisphere, Venezuela.
In this disaster in South America, the ANC can do no better than dust off the discredited mantra of the National Party’s foreign policy mantra, “No external interference in the internal affairs of other countries.”
The governing party’s brazen hypocrisy is in fact much worse than the double standard it raises in the world today. It is, with the arrival in Caracas this past weekend of a top heavy ANC delegation, led by secretary general Ace Magashula, taking an active stand of solidarity. But the side it has chosen is the oppressor regime there and not with the long suffering people of what was once the richest country in Latin America.