ANALYSIS: The Long and Winding Road: Naledi Pandor By Peter Fabricius Pfabric
Naledi Pandor has inherited several pressing foreign policy dilemmas from her outgoing predecessor Lindiwe Sisulu.
Arguably, however, this is not a decision primarily for the International Relations and Cooperation Minister but more for the new Justice Minister, Ronald Lamola, who took over from Michael Masuthaor more likely, the whole Cabinet. Masutha was clearly in favour of pulling out of the ICC. Lamola has not publicly expressed his views on this.
That prompted Zev Krengel, national vice-president of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies, to tell the SA Jewish Report that Sisulu was “the single biggest enemy” of South African Jewry in the government. This fuelled speculation that Sisulu’s stance on the status of the SA embassy in Israel would cost her her job as Minister of International Relations and Cooperation.
In March 2014, after about the third attempt on Nyamwasa’s life, Pretoria finally reacted by expelling three Rwandan diplomats and one Burundian from the Rwandan High Commission in Pretoria. Rwanda retaliated by expelling six South African diplomats from the SA High Commission in Kigali. Both high commissions remained operating on skeleton staff.
On Rwanda, Pandor could probably simplify her task by not making any gratuitous remarks backing the ambitions of dissidents to negotiate with Kagame. But she will still require skill to navigate around the many built-in landmines in the SA-Rwanda relationship. Protecting the lives and political rights of Nyamwasa and the RNC while also reassuring Kigali that these dissidents are not using SA as a haven from which to plot Kagame’s violent overthrow is never going to be easy.
But there has not been any visible shift towards a more assertive human rights stance on the higher-profile UN Security Council where South Africa took up a two-year seat in January. We have mostly witnessed more of the same sort of decisions as South Africa often controversially took during its first two terms on the Council, in 2007-2008 and 2011 -2012.
SA’s ambassador Jerry Matjila said further pressure on the South Sudanese leaders was not necessary as a peace process was already underway. But since this is about the third or fourth such peace effort and all the others have collapsed in renewed fighting, that seemed unduly optimistic. In practice then, Pretoria is content to watch bad governments continue to do bad things to their people, reassured somehow that if no-one from the international community interferes with them, they will somehow eventually see the light, mend their ways, and become model leaders.
In other words, championing human rights in South Africa’s foreign policy is also good for its economic diplomacy which will in itself presumably be another major challenge for Pandor. This is clearly a major priority for Ramaphosa whose investment drive has overshadowed other objectives and who has barely mentioned specific foreign policy issues in his speeches.
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