Is there any political aphorism more tediously overused than “a week is a long time in politics”? Attributed to to Harold Wilson — Britain’s two-term Labour prime minister — he is said to have uttered these words at a lobby briefing for journalists during the country’s 1964 sterling currency crisis.
Wilson’s Conservative predecessor, Harold Macmillan, is similarly reported to have quipped “events, my dear boy, events” in response to a news correspondent’s question about what he feared most during his premiership.
Pithy though they may be, both anecdotes are likely apocryphal, given that neither man recalled uttering these words when questioned about them. But if ever there was a time to dust off these well-worn clichés, this week is surely that time.
It all began with Rwandan president-for-life Paul Kagame, who decided it would be prudent and statesmanlike to threaten South Africa with open warfare via a social media post on X. “If South Africa prefers confrontation, Rwanda will deal with the matter in that context any day”, he declared.
This was in response to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s remarks mourning the loss of 13 South African soldiers at the hands of the M23 rebel forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who enjoy the backing of the Rwandan president and the covert support of the Rwanda Defence Force. Kagame’s chaotic statement and subsequent media interviews suggest that he is now a man wholly without advisers willing to challenge his delusions of grandeur.
They have also lent credence to the mounting international calls for his political isolation amid evidence that Rwanda is behind the bloody conflict in the mineral-rich province of North Kivu in the DRC. UN experts have accused Kagame of providing sophisticated arms and training to M23, and of exporting the rare earth mineral, coltan, across the border to Rwanda by the hundreds of tonnes on a monthly basis.
Some of the president’s most enthusiastic Western backers and political supporters are starting slowly to back out of their relationship with Rwanda — including the UK, whose foreign secretary, David Lammy, warned that the country’s continued military interference in the DRC could jeopardise the $1bn (R18.41bn) in aid it receives annually. Addressing the House of Commons, he added: “We are clear that we cannot have countries challenging the territorial integrity of other countries.”
Speaking of interfering in the territorial integrity of other countries, this week also brought with it the bizarre, but retrospectively predictable, spectacle of recently re-elected US President Donald Trump declaring a diplomatic war on South Africa — also via a social media post. Trump’s stated motivation for this broadside is the lie that “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY”. But it doesn’t take a an experienced cartographer to draw a line between Trump’s sudden outrage over the economic justice and redress laws passed by a sovereign state and his new chief bestie Elon Musk’s business aspirations in South Africa being thwarted by BBBEE and local ownership requirements in the Electronic Communications Act (ECA).
Emotional immaturity in grown men is so exhausting
Starlink — the internet satellite operator and telecommunications provider wholly owned by Musk’s US company, SpaceX — has repeatedly tried and failed to sidestep the ECA stipulation that all communications licence holders in South Africa must be 30% locally-owned by historically disadvantaged groups.
Just last month, the US government blocked American users from accessing the China-backed social media platform TikTok for 12 hours, arguing that it poses a communications and national security risk to US citizens and should be American-owned if it is to continue operating in the country. The ban followed a bill passed in the US Congress — and signed into law by President Joe Biden — which required that TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sell its assets to an American owner.
The law was dubbed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act and passed with overwhelming support from both Republican and Democratic legislators. On January 20, in the hours following the government’s 12-hour pre-emptive strike, a newly-inaugurated Donald Trump signed an executive order giving TikTok a further 75 days to comply with the act. The company was effusive in its gratitude, stating: “We will work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.”
Apparently, what is good for the American goose is not good for the South African gander. In response to the enforcement of our own local-ownership laws, Trump has warned that “The United States won’t stand for it, we will act. Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”
Emotional immaturity in grown men is so exhausting.
It is important to remember that this sudden, breathless condemnation of what Musk this week called South Africa’s “openly racist ownership laws” is merely an effort at further self-enrichment using state power — a beloved tactic of authoritarians and their oligarch proxies the world over. We should not make the mistake of entertaining this “debate” by offering endless insights and attempts at clarification. For “Expropriation Act”, read “Electronic Communications Act”, and remember, this is all about the money.
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