What exactly is South Africa getting from its diplomatic dalliance with Russia and other BRICS states?

On Pretoria's seemingly rudderless foreign policy posture in Africa and beyond

Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa at the G7 Summit in Germany (2022). Source: Daily Maverick

I: No longer invited to the big party

Breaking with precedent, Japan did not invite South Africa to this year’s G7 Summit in Hiroshima (May 19-21, 2023). South Africa had recently emerged as a regular attendee and representative of African states at G7 summits. Instead, Comoros President Azali Assoumani represented Africa in his capacity as current chairman of the African Union (AU).

Likely explanations of the snub include South Africa’s refusal to host the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) in 2016, Pretoria’s absence at last year’s TICAD in Tunisia, and/or South Africa’s ongoing close relations with Moscow in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Tokyo’s decision might also have been motivated by the desire to use its G7 helmsmanship to institutionalize relations with the African Union, perhaps as a counter to its regional rival China. It is worth noting that Japan’s invitation of the AU, and not South Africa, was consistent with invitations of current chairs of the Pacific Islands Forum (Cook Island), ASEAN (Indonesia), and the G20 (India).

Whatever the reasoning behind it, getting kicked out of the G7 shindig symbolizes South Africa’s waning geopolitical relevance in Africa, and by extension its ability to project itself on the global stage as a serious middle power like other BRICs states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).

Throughout all this South Africa put on a brave face. It conducted joint military exercises with Russia and China. Ramaphosa plans to host a BRICS summit in Durban, which comes with the possibility of hosting (and presumably not arresting) President Vladimir Putin of Russia who is wanted by the International Criminal Court. And when United States publicly accused Pretoria of selling weapons to Russia, the reaction was one of indignant defiance despite the potential costs. The fact that Washington chose to publicly confront South Africa over the alleged weapons sale suggests that continued friendliness with Russia is likely to come with a price. I would not be surprised if it emerged that Japan’s decision to not invite President Ramaphosa was partially influenced by Washington. While the U.S. has since sought to downplay the public spat over the alleged weapons sale, it is fair to say that the relationship between the two countries is cooler than normal.

Given the potential associated costs (including the possible loss of $15b worth of access to the US market under AGOA), it is worth asking what exactly South Africa is getting in return for its very public performance of friendship with Russia. In other words, is there more to South Africa’s foreign policy beyond symbolic defiance against an admittedly outdated and flawed international system?

Of course South Africa has every right, as a sovereign state, to pursue foreign policies that advance its strategic interests. Furthermore, it is perfectly understandable that Pretoria would bristle at the idea of being lectured on international law and norms by Western states that for decades backed or were equivocal on the abhorrent apartheid regime. Reasonable people would agree that it is human (and indeed prudent and honorable) to want to pay back allies who lent a helping hand at the most difficult of times; and to distrust Janus-faced official perfidy. This would be readily obvious to anyone who understands that apartheid isn’t ancient history. A lot of South Africans who lived through it in all its ignominious horror are still alive and have cause to be skeptical of the post-1945 “liberal international order.” For example, Hector Pieterson, who was gunned down as a schoolboy (along with at least 175 others) in the 1976 Soweto uprising would only be 58 today.

It takes a lot (and a while) to trust people and/or uphold structures of global “order” that condoned the mowing down of your beloved children. No one should be surprised that, having internalized the lessons of history, South Africa is choosing to hedge rather than pick geopolitical sides.

With this in mind, the goal of this post is not necessarily to critique specific foreign policy choices made by South Africa. Rather, it is to interrogate whether Pretoria is maximizing its potential sources of geopolitical influence and leverage as it seeks to navigate the contemporary multipolar environment.

The main claim here is that South Africa would be in a much better position to act as a middle power if it had significant economic and political influence across Africa. Unfortunately, since 1994 the country has struggled to position itself at the apex of a democratic and developmentalist agenda across Africa (or even within the Southern Africa Development Community, SADC). The inability to leverage its influence in the region means that South Africa may not be in a position to get the most from its engagements with middle and major powers on the global stage — including Russia.

II: Abandoning the “Gateway to Africa” dream

South Africa’s tendency to punch well below its geopolitical weight in Africa was not predetermined. Former president Thabo Mbeki once championed the brilliant idea of building South Africa’s global strength through stronger ties with fellow African countries. After succeeding Nelson Mandela in 1999, Mbeki embarked on a mission to rebrand Africa as a stable and well-governed region that is open for business; and position South Africa as the gateway to the region. In Mbeki’s mind, this meant recreating institutions of continental cooperation and unity, including the Organization of African Unity (OAU), to make them more agile and responsive to the region’s governance, developmental, and security needs.

To this end, Mbeki had eager partners in Nigeria’s Olesegun Obasanjo and Liya’s Muamar Gaddafi. Obasanjo had seen Nigeria shoulder a disproportionate share of the cost of stabilizing the Mano River region in the early 1990s and wanted the Continent to share the burden (in addition to boosting Nigeria’s stature as a regional hegemon). Gaddafi was out on a quest to rebrand as a constructive Pan-Africanist, after failing to be influential in the Arab League and decades of funding “revolutionary” insurgents and terrorists in Africa and the Middle East (and some legitimate freedom fighters like uMkhonto we Sizwe). Together, Obasanjo, Mbeki, and Gaddafi were instrumental in the creation of the African Union (AU) and envisioned it to be a more effective organization than the OAU.

Examples of initiatives that sought to realize Mbeki’s dream include the Millennium Partnership for Africa’s Recovery Program (MAP), New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and the idea of the “African Renaissance.”

Presidents Olesegun Obasanjo, Muamar Gaddafi, and Thabo Mbeki.

Mbeki failed. The creation of the African Union did not provide the platform for South Africa to position itself as the gateway to the Continent as he had intended. The AU is certainly a much more empowered international organization than the OAU. However, its organizational structure and operations (not to mention donor-dependent funding) do not lend themselves to easy capture by a would-be regional hegemon like South Africa.

Failure in Addis Ababa was amplified by failures at home.

First, the African National Congress (ANC) was unable to get over its internal interest group politics (workers vs farmers vs industrialists vs bureaucrats) in the quest to position South Africa as a leading economic player in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). The unresolved contest between labor-intensive vs capital-intensive industries meant that South Africa could not develop a decisive agenda for regional economic integration. A largely functional, rather than institutionalized, form of regional integration was the result. Pretoria projected the same posture beyond SADC.

Second, South Africa’s continental “good governance” agenda and designs for norm entrepreneurship crashed and burned on first contact with reality in Zimbabwe. The country’s quick descent into political decay after 2000 — especially around the much-needed land reform — shaped South Africa’s stances on democracy and governance in Africa. In short, Pretoria could not push President Robert Mugabe hard on his approach to electoral politics and land reform without inviting questions about South Africa’s own racialized history of lopsided land ownership (and the ANC’s failure to effectively address the matter).

Africa’s rebranding was not going to happen. Zimbabwe disabused South African policymakers of any hopes of being the norm-peddling vanguard of democracy and good governance in a new Africa. When in 2011 Mugabe refused to comply with a ruling by the SADC tribunal (a regional court), South Africa and other members simply disbanded the tribunal.

Instead of a confident South Africa out to remake Africa and act as the gateway to the region, what the world got was an increasingly inward-focused country that punched well below its geopolitical weight. The ghastly images of deadly xenophobic attacks against African migrants that became common after 2008 reinforced the idea of an insular South Africa uninterested in leading the Continent. Mbeki’s successors did not even pretend to have continental ambitions. Bogged down by ever-worsening domestic crises and an ANC that was full of foreign policy contradictions, Kgalema Motlanthe, Jacob Zuma, and Cyril Ramaphosa showed a lot less interest in an Africa-focused grand strategy.

III: Which way forward?

The “gateway to Africa” dream dead, South Africa found little incentive to be a major player in intra-African relations. It also foreclosed any possibility of using regional influence as a strategic source of power.

Perhaps the tendency to go it alone in global affairs might have been an internalized legacy of apartheid — when white supremacist administrations could cast South Africa and be taken seriously as the outpost of Western-led “liberal international order” in Africa. However, one would expect the ANC leadership to understand that Black majority rule disqualified them from any such privileges. Under these circumstances, going it alone was guaranteed to produce suboptimal outcomes (especially since the rest of the continent had a 30-year head start on inter-state cooperation).

There is little reason to believe that the ANC will resolve its internal contradictions any time soon so that South Africa can have a coherent foreign policy agenda (no truly democratic country can enjoy such luxury). It needs both its labor and capital intensive wings onside. Furthermore, any realist compromises must be balanced against the demands of an ideologically-motivated constructivist faction that is happy to incur costs in service to ideas of global justice. The constructivist faction covers a wide range of issue areas such as self-determination in Western Sahara and Palestine; maintaining close relations with China, Russia, and Cuba (and Gaddafi’s Libya before); the championing of a militant version of Pan-Africanism characterized by performative opposition to Western-led internationalism; and valorization of South-South solidarity.

Pretoria need not necessarily overcome these contradictions before it can have a coherent continental grand strategy. A possible way forward might be for the presidency to sponsor continental initiatives that would facilitate other African countries’ recognition of South African leadership. The presidency can do this directly, or launder it through think tanks or research institutes at South Africa’s leading universities with reach in other African countries. Ideas are a powerful resource in international relations.

As a region, Africa desperately needs coordinated positions on sovereign ratings and interest rates on debt; ongoing efforts to reform the World Bank; energy access and financing for climate-related damage and loss, mitigation, and adaptation; access to minerals that are critical to energy transition; navigating the coming economic wars between the United States and China; management of regional security challenges; and cooperation on cross-border investments in infrastructure.

Taking the lead on these issues is possible without necessarily running into intra-ANC factional squabbles. In any case, Pretoria can always blame Addis Ababa and lean on constructivist appeals to Pan-Africanism as the reason to go along with emerging continental positions (that are nonetheless infused with considerations for South African interests).

Strength on the Continent would likely translate into global leverage. Relations with Brazil, India, China, Russia, and others can be leveraged to solve some of South Africa’s domestic challenges — including access to cheaper energy, technology transfers to increase productivity, market access to boost manufacturing output and create jobs, and support for African initiatives in multilateral organizations.

As the leading African representative on South-South cooperation, South Africa is in a unique position to shape its realization in the region. Doing so would be the smart thing to do if it wants anything more than symbolic thumbing the nose at the principal beneficiaries of the post-1945 international system.