Why? I’ve seen too many articles asking why we would jeopardise our vast trade ties with the West to support Russia. The obvious — the only — answer is that the Russians are financing the ANC. A few months ago the ANC couldn’t pay staff salaries. Now it can?
Our diplomacy is a joke on the international circuit. Our embassies are headed predominantly by political appointments now, used by all ANC presidents to reward or console fallen comrades. They all learn the same script: Palestine, the Western Sahara, racism, imperialism.
You have to wonder how President Cyril Ramaphosa’s team of emissaries to the US are doing. Are they back? The team — led by Ramaphosa’s security adviser, Sydney Mufamadi, arguably the most boring man in our entire body politic, and including deputy foreign minister Alvin Botes, fresh from an ass-kissing ANC party visit to Moscow — were in the US to try to reassure disenchanted political leaders there that the Russian alliance is just a principled position of non-alignment in an increasingly repolarising world, and to please not terminate our inclusion in the African Growth & Opportunities Act (Agoa), under which we export everything from cars to oranges to the US, duty free.