When the occasion demands, President Cyril Ramaphosa steps up and talks tough, especially when he is out of the country. He seems to find the chutzpah to speak truth to world power.
Many will recall how he stood up to French President Emmanuel Macron at the summit for a new global financing pact in Paris, telling him how the Global North had shut doors to vaccines on us. “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.”
At the Brics summit in Johannesburg Ramaphosa waxed lyrical about Africa’s mineral exploitation, noting African nations no longer wanted to export “rock and sand” but minerals processed on the continent, creating jobs here.
On climate change, he 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.” Go figure!
On the global front, he comes across as someone waging a war for Africa, taking on bullies on behalf of the underdogs. You’d expect he’s much beloved on the African front and commands much respect.
Yet our humiliation this week in what now looks like a misguided attempt to fight for the presidency of the powerful African Development Bank (AfDB) tells a different story. South Africa threw its weight behind Swazi Tshabalala, a respected banker who served as the AfDB deputy from 2020 until she made a bid for the top post last year.
She lost this week to Mauritania’s Sidi Ould Tah. A rejection of Tshabalala is perforce a rejection of our country. But the truth is that before Africa rejected us, we were rejected by Sadc when it put forward Zambia’s Samuel Maimbo, a senior executive at the World Bank, who also failed to make the grade.
Why did we fail to convince our neighbours? If Ramaphosa makes great moves trying to convince Macron and other world leaders on crucial subjects, why would we fail to even get regional support to move a deputy into the AfDB presidency? How do we get outperformed by a country less well known and one of the poorest in the world? It beggars’ belief that it would punch above our weight on the continent.
Did the AfDB not matter, or did we sleep on the job?
The AfDB is considered a critical player for major infrastructure development projects on the continent that private banks see as “too risky”, but which are fundamental for growth.
Infrastructure forms a central plank of Ramaphosa’s economic revitalisation, with an unprecedented R1-trillion budgeted in the medium term. This, theoretically, implied he would be interested in the battle plan for taking over the AfDB, its chances of success and in making critical decisions about whether to launch or bail out at any point.
We don’t, as a country, have the confidence of smaller economies around us. We don’t command the respect we used to in years gone by
But alas. We flunked it. It couldn’t have been about whether Tshabalala is qualified. It surely could not have been about the fact that she is a woman. Look at Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-lweala who is now seeing off her term as the director-general of the World Trade Organisation. She is the first woman and first African to lead the global trade body. How did the Nigerians get the diplomatic footwork right? If we suspected Tshabalala’s gender was to become a fundamental impediment, what did we do to obviate it? We slept on this opportunity.
The person who was meant to champion Tshabalala’s candidacy is finance minister Enoch Godongwana who, in the period leading up to the election this week, was immersed in an unprecedented process of redoing and tabling the budget thrice. On the surface, Godongwana dropped the ball.
But what’s new? He dropped the ball on VAT, surprising his colleagues in the cabinet who then turned criticism of his budget proposal on him, igniting calls elsewhere that he should step aside to allow someone with fresh ideas to take over. In this environment, poor Tshabalala was grist for the mill, as less powerful countries on the continent ran rings around us.
No excuses must be made for Godongwana. He, like the rest of us, knew last year that we had no backing in Sadc but made no plan to overcome this. But who was going to? Hunting as a solid unit is a start but won’t ensure victory, as we saw with Sadc losing the Commonwealth secretary-general bid to Ghana. But hunting as a unit, as we saw during the Thabo Mbeki years, helps to find ways of influencing other economic blocs. Our disunity is self-sabotage.
We don’t, as a country, have the confidence of smaller economies around us. We don’t command the respect we used to in years gone by. We didn’t bother to lift a finger even when we saw that this AfDB bus was headed for a crash. The government, Godongwana and international relations minister Ronald Lamola couldn’t be bothered.
It was the height of folly. We should have withdrawn Tshabalala, accepting we have no diplomatic heft in the region, much less the continent, ahead of this election.
Losing is not bad when you had a plan that had a reasonable chance of success. In that way, you don’t look like perennial losers. That we are Africa’s most sophisticated economy is not translating into diplomatic heft and influence when it matters. We must wake up.
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