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It is a truism of politics that when in need of inspiration you fall back on an early playbook — or on an operator from a previous era. It is of course a risk, as the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US showed. But the hope is for a masterstroke. Now, in the twilight of his career, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has harked back to his glory days in the 1990s to reprise a partnership that changed the course of history.
It is more than 30 years since Ramaphosa, as chief negotiator of the then liberation movement, the African National Congress, helped finesse the end of apartheid. His opposite number from the National Party, for over four decades the enforcer of white rule, was a soft-spoken Afrikaner called Roelf Meyer. Now Ramaphosa has summoned Meyer from retirement to another ticklish mediating role. He is to be South Africa’s ambassador to the US with a brief to woo Donald Trump.
In a heady moment in November 1993, Ramaphosa and Meyer led an impromptu dance early one morning to celebrate the apartheid settlement. Since then the fairytale has dissipated as many in the ANC have gone down the self-enriching road of so many ex-liberation movements, losing sight of the difference between party and state.
South Africa was the toast of DC in the first decade after the end of apartheid, but no longer. The previous ambassador was expelled for anti-Trump rhetoric. There is deep frustration on both sides on Capitol Hill over the ANC’s refusal to break links with Russia and Iran, and its cosiness with China. Peter Pham, a US special envoy to Africa in Trump’s first term, cautions that without shifts in Pretoria’s foreign policy the “same irritants” will remain.
Antipathy in Trump’s White House is fuelled by the bitterness and frustrations of prominent white émigrés about South Africa’s Black economic empowerment policies and high crime rates — and by wild far-right conspiracy theories of a “genocide” against whites.
If anyone, however, can rebuild trust in a relationship so vital for South Africa’s economy, it may be Meyer. As a verligte (reformist) Afrikaner Nationalist in the early 1990s he had to win over verkramptes (hardliners) in then-president FW de Klerk’s cabinet. He will have his work cut out to win over DC’s latter-day verkramptes; back home, the Afrikaner rightwingers feeding their prejudices present Meyer as a sellout.
But as an Afrikaner he will have credibility in rebutting wild distortions about the lot of the white minority; and given he is not an ANC apparatchik he may be able to acknowledge privately the party’s mis-steps. It has governed South Africa since 1994, with the last two years as the dominant party in a coalition, and is long overdue a spell in opposition.
For all the ANC’s failings, however, South Africa has long had the capacity to surprise. Its run in the last month or so has reinforced a tentatively more positive view among businesspeople. In the same week as the Meyer appointment, the populist leader, Julius Malema, who had seemed to have immunity from prosecution, was jailed for five years for firing an assault rifle at a rally. He is appealing against the sentence but cut a chastened figure in the dock. The case was a reminder of the resilience of South Africa’s institutions after their evisceration under Jacob Zuma, Ramaphosa’s predecessor.
Another state body in better health than a decade ago is the South African Revenue Service. Its revival reinforces the improving prospects for the economy, notwithstanding higher oil prices. There is also fresh vigour in the Democratic Alliance, the historically white-dominated main opposition party, which has elected a youthful leader, Geordin Hill-Lewis, who has empathy, ebullience and clearly appreciates the challenge of winning over Black voters.
Ramaphosa’s epic 50-year on-off political career is near an end. His trademark caution has frustrated business as he has focused on trying to keep the ANC together. But by appointing Meyer he has put country above party, as he did in allowing the private sector to help tackle the power crisis.
South Africa is enjoying a lull in its psychodrama. People of all races are united in laughing about a showboating Afrikaner couple who went last year to the US, alongside the wave of “refugees”, and now face deportation back home after being arrested for shoplifting. In the reconciliatory spirit of the 1990s, Ramaphosa should speak out against the populists who still sing the inflammatory old anti-apartheid chant, “Kill the Boer”.
That would aid his old buddy Meyer’s cause, and so the nation — as would more economic reforms to encourage much-needed investment. One masterstroke can lead to another . . .
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