It could not get any worse. As much as the South African foreign affairs bosses tried to scramble a recovery on Friday after being publicly accused by the American ambassador of selling arms to the Russians as they pursue their invasion of Ukraine, enormous damage has been done to our relations with the US, with which we do some R400bn worth of trade and have, throughout our society, a huge cultural affinity.
All this to protect our relationship with an aggressive butcher, Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who murders his opponents at home and is charged by the International Criminal Court with abducting Ukrainian children and shipping them to Russia. He is due to visit South Africa in August.
Once again Cyril Ramaphosa finds himself trying to squeeze through the eye of a needle of his own making.
Always late, always shocked. He would have known absolutely nothing about the full South African naval escort that accompanied the Russian freighter, the Lady R, into the Simon's Town base at dusk on Tuesday, December 6 last year, its transponder switched off, a sneak visit.
The Americans watch us. In 2013, I have it on impeccable authority, former president Jacob Zuma took a late night call from president Barack Obama in Washington. Obama was calling to warn Zuma that a US satellite had detected an attempted intrusion at the Phelindaba nuclear facility outside Pretoria.
Zuma knew nothing about it and was apparently not pleased to get the call. Nothing was said in public. With the Lady R however, Washington had warned Pretoria several times it was headed our way and that it was used by the Russians to carry weapons and we should watch out for it. The warnings were ignored.
But it is clear that as South African support for Russia has hardened over the year it has had troops inside Ukraine, so relations with the West have been strained. Ramaphosa earlier this month sent his security adviser, Sydney Mufamadi, and a team to the US to try to calm concerns. The US ambassador here, Reuben Brigety, went with them.
The Lady R issue came up during the visit. At least one US senator directly suggested the Russians had picked up weaponry in Simon's Town (our story is that it dropped off weapons, an old pre-Covid order for our special forces). We told the Americans we would appoint an inquiry to check.
Brigety did not withdraw his accusation and if his government required him to he would have made that clear
Brigety, though, repeated the accusation in public on Thursday. He would “bet his life” that we loaded weapons onto that ship, he said.
The rand, already badly wounded by our poor economic policies and performance, went into a tailspin.
Dirco, the ridiculously named foreign affairs department, demarched him (crapped on him) and said he had “unconditionally” apologised. Brigety's version was different.
He said he was “grateful for the opportunity to speak with Foreign Minister Pandor this evening [Friday] and correct any misimpressions left by my public remarks”.
That all changes nothing. The house, as Tim Cohen put it so well on Thursday, is on fire.
The Americans will have us on a list. It isn't that you can easily walk away from South Africa — we remain a major democracy in a strategically important part of the world. But things will not be the same again for a long time.
Brigety did not withdraw his accusation and if his government required him to he would have made that clear.
So they still think we sold arms to Russia and it will play extremely poorly in the West. We at least know now why Ramaphosa was not invited to the G7 summit in Japan next week. An inquiry will need to see the original arms order we say the Russians were fulfilling. It will need to see the signalling and orders that got the Lady R into a naval facility and not Cape Town harbour.
I don't think we did sell the Russians any weapons. There was unloading to get to the South African order and then reloading back to the ship of what had been first taken out? What do I know.
All the weapons and munitions we make are to Nato standards and wouldn't function in Russian systems.
That didn't stop a canny Putin calling Ramaphosa on Friday and announcing afterwards that the two had agreed to strengthen ties. Not a word of complaint from Dirco about that.
But Ramaphosa's tenebrous politics, his catch-me-if-you-can with his party and his country, have finally caught up with him. Weak and devious, he has now created a diplomatic fiasco inside an economic catastrophe. He has lost the West but the West should be wary of losing South Africa.
We will all, meanwhile, have to pay to clean up what he has done.
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