President Cyril Ramaphosa did well this week. He always does when the occasion requires him to develop balls of steel. He has a way of making you proud to be South African — until you start looking beneath the surface.
The big thing he did this week was to reaffirm our place under the sun by pushing back against the bullies who want us to renegotiate what it means to be us, to be human. Those who want to question our history and our laws. We will not be bullied, he said, unleashing nervous excitement.
Yet in truth, we get bullied all the time. He knows it too. Sometimes the bullying is covert, other times we are conscious of it but powerless to do anything other than complain. Think of how we were denied Covid vaccines until almost everyone in the developed world who wanted them, got them. We didn’t choose to be at the back of the queue. It wasn’t about not having the funds to buy them.
They even produced vaccines here in South Africa and shipped them to worthy nations while we watched South Africans sicken and die. This is why it was great to hear Ramaphosa in June 2023, at the summit for a new global financing pact in Paris, tell President Emmanuel Macron the truth about how the doors to vaccines were shut on us.
If we had half the courage required to lead, we wouldn’t have time for anyone trying to threaten us with withholding aid and donations
“We felt like we were beggars when it came to vaccine availability. We needed access to vaccines but the northern hemisphere countries had bought all the vaccines in the world and they were hogging them and they didn’t want to release them at the time when we needed them most.”
You need power and resources to be a bully, though not everyone with power and resources is a bully.
Exploitation is bullying and we, as a country and a continent, have been bullied for years. Our country and continent are endowed with minerals. If we had half the courage required to lead, we wouldn’t have time for anyone trying to threaten us with withholding aid and donations.
Former French president Jacques Chirac said 17 years ago that France would slide to the rank of Third World country without its links to Africa — a relationship of exploitation and bullying. Ramaphosa, referring to Africa’s mineral wealth, has in the past vowed that the continent will no longer export “rock and sand” but will embrace investors who process the minerals and create jobs here. Nothing much has changed.
On climate change, the so-called “just transition” isn’t just. The poorest nations in the world bear the brunt while the richest nations — the US and China — drag their feet.
Ramaphosa has said: “Centuries after the end of the slave trade, decades after the end of the colonial exploitation of Africa’s resources, the people of our continent are again bearing the cost of industrialisation of the North and the development of the wealthy nations of the world. This is a price the people of Africa are no longer prepared to pay.”
But when were we prepared to pay? We have been, and remain, bullied. Again, when he talks like this, he imbues us with a sense of being and direction. Yet, consistently, these great speeches aren’t followed by decisive action.
The lunatics in Washington, however, have resources and power. They do not prevaricate. They sign executive orders, however ill-considered. They use what they have to defend their turf.
If we seriously think about the Expropriation Act, do we believe that the Americans and Elon Musk are ignorant of its contents and we must spend copious amounts of time encouraging them to read it? Do we seriously believe these are victims of mis- and disinformation who rely on social media reports about “certain classes” of people who suffer expropriation and then punish whole nations?
I don’t think so. It is obvious to many that the brouhaha is not about this 50-year-old apartheid legislation, even when Trump lists it in his latest executive order. The real bullying is about section 25 of the constitution and discussions elsewhere about whether a real land expropriation bill — not the act Ramaphosa signed last month — should even be considered. In other words, we are meant to think “if Musk and Trump (over) react this way on a law that has not led to any transformation or even dispossession, imagine what the reaction will be when the real land reform is put on the table?”
The war now under way is psychological. Wasting our breath explaining this law to Washington, which has its own functionaries who could do it, is to misdirect ourselves. We are meant to start believing that the idea of redress (which is in our constitution), of transformation, of change, of empowering those who apartheid dehumanised, is ridiculous. Misinformation is used to whip us into postponing transformation. This is sophisticated bullying that weaponises misinformation. If we ignore the constitution’s injunction for change, what do we become?
The truth is poor countries around the world may celebrate independence and freedom days, but such notions are misnomers. We have huge dependencies that make a mockery of the idea of independence. If freedom and independence mean our rights to vote, to use same buses, to access parks and beaches without being kicked off on the basis of race, well, great.
But the war currently under way is not only about the Expropriation Act, it is about something more fundamental, something Ramaphosa has been raising at international forums — the need for meaningful change. The people against change, such as Trump and Musk, have stopped being polite. Ramaphosa has the balls to talk tough but the dependencies make the wiggle room for movement too narrow. Now the US is showing us that power is, well, useful, when it’s used. If we are to stop exporting rocks and dust, then we need action.
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