Africa's Lost Leader

South Africa's continental role since apartheid

James Hamill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429536526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

When Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president on 10 May 1994, South Africa enjoyed an unprecedented global standing. Much of the international community, particularly Western states, saw the new South Africa as well equipped to play a dynamic and dominant role on the continent; promoting conflict resolution, economic development, and acting as a standard-bearer for democracy and human rights.Yet, throughout the presidencies of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, South Africa has failed to deliver on this early promise. Its continental primacy has been circumscribed by its own reluctance to lead, combined with widespread African hostility to its economic expansion, antipathy towards its democratic ideals and scepticism about its suitability as Africas global representative. With an onerous domestic agenda, as it continues to tackle the profound socio-economic legacies of apartheid, and with its military power also on the wane, South Africa must now adapt to an emerging multipolarity on the continent. This transition which may produce a new concert of African powers working in constructive collaboration or lead to fragmentation, discord and gridlock is likely to determine Africas prospects for decades to come.This Adelphi book squarely challenges the received wisdom that South Africa is a dominant power in Africa. It explores the countrys complex and difficult relationship with the rest of the continent in the post-apartheid era and examines the ways in which the country has struggled to translate its economic, military and diplomatic weight into tangible foreign policy successes and enduring influence on the ground. The conclusions of this book will be valuable to academics, policymakers, journalists, and business leaders seeking to understand the evolution and trajectory of South African policy in Africa.

Chapter One
Tentative hegemony from Mandela to Zuma

For the South African government, the construction of a coherent, effective Africa policy has been a priority, and one of the most demanding challenges, in the democratic era. Due to the myriad complexities of this process, the government’s performance has been chequered. South Africa’s official position – as expressed by each new administration since 1994, and articulated in successive defence reviews and government statements – is that the country’s national interest is ‘intrinsically linked to Africa’s stability, unity and prosperity¹’; it ‘cannot escape its African destiny’² and turmoil across the continent, particularly in Southern Africa, threatens its wellbeing.

Conflict and instability work to South Africa’s disadvantage by severely disrupting trade and transportation, discouraging foreign investment and increasing the flow of refugees and economic migrants southwards. Viewing the security of all states on the continent as interconnected, South Africa believes that it cannot achieve stability and prosperity if the rest of Africa remains blighted by underdevelopment, poor governance and intra-state conflict.³ As they engaged in what Brennan Kraxberger and Paul McClaughry describe as a ‘far-reaching recasting’⁴ of South Africa’s role on the continent from 1994 onwards, successive governments have been unable to insulate the country from the rest of Africa’s problems – even though geography has afforded Pretoria a certain level of protection from at least some conflicts in the region. As a consequence, South Africa has tried to assume responsibilities befitting its economic, diplomatic and military influence by working in concert with other African states on economic development, conflict management, good governance and institution-building. In this way, Pretoria has sought to counter a narrative in which Africa is viewed, in the infamous Economist phrase, as the ‘hopeless continent⁵’.

Anchored in a philosophy of enlightened self-interest, this may be a perfectly rational approach but it provides only a general statement of principle and not a route map for implementing South Africa’s ideals. Thus, the country is yet to establish a role in which it can advance its national interests, fulfil its officially acknowledged responsibilities to Africa, generate domestic support for its agenda and avoid alienating other nations. Under pressure to achieve these goals, South Africa has struggled to translate its power into tangible foreign-policy gains, and its record in Africa over the last two decades has been punctuated by high-profile failures. In the 1994–99 Mandela era, these failures came in Angola in 1994, Nigeria in 1995 and Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1997–98.⁶ (Pretoria’s 1998 intervention to restore the civilian government in Lesotho following an attempted coup was widely regarded as something of a debacle at the time,⁷ but may be viewed more sympathetically two decades on because it helped preserve an elected government and signalled that South Africa would strongly oppose any military putsch in the region.)

In the 1999–2008 Mbeki period, South Africa had both successes and failures in its neighbourhood, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) zone. The South African military undertook a major humanitarian operation in Mozambique in February–March 2000, rescuing hundreds of thousands of people from flooding and thereby projecting a new image of South Africa as a benign and even selfless actor.⁸ Although South Africa was unable to push either Zimbabwe or Swaziland towards meaningful democratic change in the Mbeki era, it was partially successful in mediating the 2000 Arusha Accords, which brought peace to Burundi through a power-sharing arrangement.⁹ As part of this effort, Pretoria deployed a peace-support force comprising 1,500 troops to Burundi between 2001 and 2009. South Africa also brokered an outline peace deal in a war-ravaged DRC that culminated in the July 2002 Pretoria Agreement, leading to the deployment of 1,400 South African troops as an important part of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC.¹⁰ Moreover, Pretoria helped build the transitional institutions, and organise the historic 2006 elections, in the DRC that flowed from the 2002 agreement.¹¹ Further afield, President Thabo Mbeki’s attempts at mediation in Côte d’Ivoire in 2004–05 made a contribution to conflict resolution in the country, but they were ultimately derailed by the perception of the opposition – as well as the UN and the African Union (AU) – that he was too partisan in favour of the president, Laurent Gbagbo, for such a complex task, and this forced him to step down.¹²

Under Jacob Zuma, Mbeki’s successor, this uneven performance has continued. Pretoria has been relatively successful in contributing to security in the DRC, and in playing a stabilising role on the border of Ethiopia and Eritrea in response to the 1998–2000 war between the two states. But these achievements must be weighed against South Africa’s less effective operations in the ongoing conflict in Darfur, the confusion and indecision of its policy during the conflicts in Côte d’Ivoire in 2010–11 and Libya in 2011, and its outright failure in the Central African Republic in 2013 (see Chapter Four). At the time of writing, there was little prospect that Pretoria would successfully mediate in the conflict in South Sudan, Africa’s newest state, despite the close relationship between the African National Congress (ANC) and South Sudan’s ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement.¹³

Leadership, ethics and African resistance under Mandela

When Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president on 10 May 1994, South Africa enjoyed unprecedented global standing, a valuable asset in the foreign-policy toolkit of any state. This popularity stemmed largely from the personality of Mandela himself – particularly his ability to transcend his life experience by rejecting bitterness and demagoguery in favour of reconciliation and nation-building – but also from the nature of South Africa’s 1990–94 democratic transition. Due to its unlikely and historic constitutional compromise – forged by multi-party negotiators on the highly unpromising terrain created by the prolonged political and economic crisis of the mid- to late 1980s – South Africa emerged as a state that had no enemies and could draw upon a vast reservoir of international goodwill.

The country had moved not merely from ‘pariah to participant’, as Greg Mills put it,¹⁴ but from pariah to moral exemplar. This transformation was so rapid and profound as to be virtually without parallel in international politics. There was also a powerful desire in the international community for a success story in Africa, given the continent’s bleak post-independence landscape of economic decline, conflict, military coups and, more recently, failed states. However, as J.E. Spence has observed, no state’s foreign policy is ever a tabula rasa.¹⁵ Even the new South Africa had to grapple with the various ways in which the legacy of apartheid shaped and conditioned attitudes towards the country, especially among other African states. Thus, Pretoria’s post-1994 Africa policy developed in the long shadow cast by the militarism and malign dominance of the apartheid regime. Seeking a definitive break with this history of destabilisation and cross-border aggression – in which South Africa became what Adekeye Adebajo calls a ‘regional tsotsi’ (outlaw)¹⁶ – the Mandela government engendered a culture of caution and restraint by disavowing all hegemonic aspirations and expressing reluctance to project military force.

However, South Africa’s considerable economic and military capacity combined with its new-found global standing to raise expectations about its leadership potential. Much of the international community, particularly Western states, saw South Africa as well equipped to play a dynamic role in Africa by promoting conflict resolution and economic development, and by acting as a standard-bearer for democracy and human rights. Yet the perception of South Africa as the continent’s ‘indispensable nation’ was not shared by all African states, some of which remained suspicious of its power and capabilities. Many countries in the region also resented the presumptuousness of a newly reconstituted state – particularly one led by a movement that had received extensive African assistance throughout its liberation struggle – believing it had the right to lecture the continent’s veteran leaders on their political behaviour.¹⁷ Since 1994, South Africa’s rehabilitation on the continent has been complex and fractious for successive governments in Pretoria. As a consequence, the country has adopted fluctuating positions both within and between administrations in attempting to lead the region without dominating it.

The word ‘hegemony’ has been banished from the vocabulary of all post-1994 administrations in favour of the more emollient language of partnership. Yet, without seeking to formalise South African hegemony, the Mandela government nonetheless retained a strong normative dimension in its approach to foreign policy. Although his administration emphasised the need to promote democracy and safeguard human rights on the continent, it did so imperfectly and inconsistently. Indeed, Mandela’s foreign-policy interventions were unpredictable to the point of eccentricity, often short-circuiting the bureaucratic chain of command through seemingly random announcements at press conferences, in interviews or in telephone calls with foreign leaders.¹⁸ Other African states interpreted this behaviour as that of a state seeking to dominate the region and impose its values on others. In 1993 Mandela had lauded human rights as the ‘light that guides our foreign policy’¹⁹ and ‘the core of international relations’,²⁰ expressing the view that democratisation was essential to strengthening peace and security on the continent. He also brusquely dismissed the idea that democracy was somehow un-African or could not take root in Africa, arguing:

Only true democracy can guarantee rights … South Africa will therefore be at the forefront of global efforts to promote and foster democratic systems of government. This is especially important in Africa, and our concerns will be fixed upon securing a spirit of tolerance and the ethos of governance throughout the continent. There cannot be one system for Africa and another for the rest of the world. If there is a single lesson to be drawn from Africa’s post-colonial history, it is that accountable government is good government.²¹

In pursuit of these ideals – which Graham Evans described as ‘the touchstone by which day-to-day foreign-policy decisions were made and implemented’²² – Mandela occasionally displayed some unilateralist tendencies that met with significant opposition in Africa. For example, in 1994 he unsuccessfully attempted to mediate between the Angolan regime, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the rebel group opposing it, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). He experienced a similar failure in 1997–98, when he tried to mediate between the Zaire/DRC leadership and its opponents – the Mobutu regime and the opposition led by Laurent Kabila, and, latterly, the Kabila regime and its Ugandan- and Rwandan-backed opponents.²³ Fatefully, in November 1995, Mandela proved unable to isolate and sanction Sani Abacha’s military regime in Nigeria following its execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni dissidents on the eve of a Commonwealth summit. The executions enraged Mandela, who viewed them as provocative, inflammatory and in breach of undertakings he had received from the Nigerian authorities.²⁴ The Ogoni dissidents had been found guilty of murder by a special military tribunal in a process that international human-rights groups viewed as deeply flawed. The episode provided an early warning of the kind of difficulties the new South Africa would confront as it sought to establish wider regional influence; it was also a stark reminder that an enviable global reputation would not necessarily translate into political authority on the continent. South Africa was rebuked by not only Nigeria but also the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which said that its punitive approach ‘was not an African way to deal with an African problem’.²⁵

Although South African policy was driven by defensible moral instincts, the approach was tactically and strategically ill-conceived because it bypassed established OAU processes and structures. It also demonstrated a naivety about African diplomacy, prompting a backlash that isolated Pretoria from the rest of the continent and led one Nigerian minister to describe South Africa as ‘a white state with a black leader’.²⁶ The following year, South Africa retreated from its hardline position on Nigeria by declaring the policy to be incompatible with ‘the norms of African solidarity’.²⁷ The shift reflected the growing influence of Mbeki, then-deputy president, on South African foreign policy well before his appointment as president in June 1999.

Despite its occasional unilateralist impulses, the Mandela administration maintained a strong commitment to multilateral organisations and initiatives. In 1995 Pretoria played a key role in helping shore up and extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), working to bridge the differences between North and South over the future of the agreement. South Africa gave its firm support to the 1998 Rome Statute, which led to the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002, a landmark development in the prosecution of human-rights abusers, including heads of state. There is no persuasive evidence that South Africa made a meaningful pitch for hegemonic regional leadership in the Mandela era. (The intervention in Lesotho can be regarded as sui generis because the country is encircled by, and completely dependent on, South Africa; thus, the operation failed to serve as a template for a more assertive and interventionist policy elsewhere in Africa.)²⁸ Indeed, in the same year as the adoption of the Rome Statute, Pretoria stridently opposed the military intervention in the DRC, in support of the Kabila regime, by SADC members Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia.²⁹

Pan-Africanism under Mbeki

Although Mbeki never formally repudiated the Mandela administration’s policy of ‘universalism’ – through which Pretoria sought relationships of equal merit with all states – he initiated a distinct shift in the emphasis and tone of South Africa’s strategic priorities, particularly in relation to the rest of the continent. He adopted a more considered focus on all of Africa rather than just the SADC zone and began to robustly reassert the country’s African identity as the central pillar of his foreign policy. He prioritised the attempt to rebuild South Africa’s standing in Africa, which had been ero...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Introduction South Africa as a hegemonic power
• Chapter One Tentative hegemony from Mandela to Zuma
• Chapter Two South Africa’s image problem in Africa
• Chapter Three The African Renaissance versus the South African Renaissance?
• Chapter Four The plight of the South African National Defence Force
• Conclusion South Africa in Africa: The challenges of the new multipolarity
• Notes
• Index