8
Disillusioned Friends (2009–2012)
You didn’t have far to look in 2009 to find optimistic forecasts about the future of Africa. Despite still assessing the impact of the 2008 financial crisis and recession, economists pointed out that African countries were outstripping much of the world in economic growth. The emerging narrative was that of a continent turning the corner from chronic under-development to vigorous expansion. In South Africa, the Brenthurst Foundation, the think tank established with the extraordinary diamond- and gold-derived wealth of the Oppenheimer family, proclaimed a new era of African prosperity. The foundation’s director Greg Mills had just published Africa’s Third Liberation: The New Search for Prosperity and Jobs which noted rates of growth of five per cent and more throughout much of the continent. He argued that the future lay not in more aid but in unlocking the potential for growth and trade.
This view dovetailed well with the Canadian government’s evolving stance. International assistance was being focused on the neediest of African countries, while a push for greater investment and trade characterized our relations with the rest. This indeed fit with the international consensus on globalization, which was that of unleashing economic growth and – in the wake of greater prosperity – a perceived appetite among emerging middle classes for better governance.
This was the prevailing view at headquarters when I started my assignment in South Africa. It was a break from a past when Africa was viewed predominantly as deeply in need of Canadian initiatives in foreign aid. There was talk of the Department developing a new Africa strategy that would over-ride that view and bring a greater geopolitical and commercial focus to relations with African countries. In the meantime, pending articulation of such a strategy (which never came), our marching orders were to focus on economic opportunity and political cooperation to strengthen rule of law and democratic institutions.
The irony in this context was that South Africa, the continent’s most developed economy, was lagging behind many of its less developed neighbours on the strict measure of GDP growth. Although its economy was larger than all others except for much more populous Nigeria, it was not rebounding from the recession, and South African business and foreign investors were losing confidence in the government’s ability to re-ignite growth. A rapidly expanding economy was vital for South Africa as about 25 per cent of its workforce, for the most part black, was unemployed. The seemingly intractable problem of how to accelerate growth sufficiently to crack the back of crippling unemployment cast a long shadow on President Jacob Zuma’s African National Congress (ANC) government.
I met President Jacob Zuma after his speech closing the South African Parliament’s budget debate in February 2011. As is the custom, many ambassadors and other embassy staff decamped from Pretoria to Cape Town for Parliament’s marquee proceedings during the southern summer political season. There was always the possibility of scoring “face time” with Zuma to press our concerns. I managed to get close to him as he circulated in the reception hall and stepped forward to introduce myself. I first complimented him on the budget’s continued restraints on expenditure. Sound fiscal management had been one of the government’s key objectives since the end of apartheid and had contributed to international confidence in South Africa’s economy, especially during the years of growth in the early 2000s. Focusing on my specific brief that day, I raised the difficulty that Canada was having in convincing the South African government to finalize a nuclear cooperation agreement, the principal negotiations for which had been wrapped up a couple of years before. Zuma’s round face was impassive; his dark eyes, slightly hooded, evinced no reaction, either to the compliment or the plea. He nodded silently and then moved on.
Zuma had just begun his first five-year presidential term. He was elected in June 2009 after already serving several months in office after ousting his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki. The Canadian government’s assessment of Zuma’s ascension was not positive. He was mired in corruption allegations over his role in a multi-billion-dollar purchase of military equipment.1 Charges were put on hold through the manipulation, intimidation and replacement of senior justice officials. He had recently been acquitted of a rape charge2 and, in a separate scandal, was about to pay a former ANC comrade and football club owner compensation for impregnating his teenage daughter.3 His supporters in the ANC, in addition to the strong Zulu community to which he belonged, included many who sought to benefit from government appointments and contracts at all levels. Patronage was tacitly justified as reward due to the victors in the struggle against apartheid. So, in the eyes of many, “the ANC was a liberation organization and is now a benefits club.”4All of the above led to a dim view of Zuma and the growing opinion that South Africa, rather than being the hopeful beacon for democracy in Africa, was starting to look like other shaky sub-Saharan African states.
I was not ready to endorse that view. Nelson Mandela famously wrote that South Africans had followed a “long walk to freedom.” The final phase of that struggle started in 1976 with student protests in Soweto and expanded to a much broader civil resistance across the entire country that the ANC described as “the people’s war.” The apartheid government surrendered, and the first multi-racial elections brought the ANC and Mandela to power in 1994. South Africa’s “new dispensation” was a milestone on the road to greater freedom worldwide. Fifteen years following the founding of the “Rainbow Nation,” I was not prepared, arriving in South Africa as the high commission’s political counsellor, to dishonour that legacy and be too quick to adopt a disillusioned view.
This perspective sustained me throughout my assignment and helped me and the two high commissioners I served to persevere when it became clear that South Africa’s politics and economy were struggling to stay on track.
Despite Canada’s officially friendly relations with South Africa and our declared hopes for its future, the relations between our countries had not recently prospered. Canada and South Africa increasingly found each other on opposite sides of debates in international fora. Our respective approaches to Israel, for example, although not at the heart of the relationship, presented an obvious case in point. The view that Israeli settlers building townships on occupied Palestinian land represented a new form of apartheid had gained a respectable currency in some South African political circles, including among officials of South Africa’s foreign ministry, DIRCO. Arguable but not truly analogous, this perspective was not endorsed by Canadian governments, Liberal or Conservative, and the Harper government’s particularly unquestioning support of Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu made the gap even bigger
Canada sought to view constructively South Africa’s new alliance in the BRICS with Brazil, Russia, India and China. But the uncritical regard in which Zuma seemed to hold Russia and China was disturbing, and Canada’s relations with the then-model democracy of Brazil were fraught with several commercial difficulties. The Harper government had re-directed some of its international assistance away for previous African recipients and our limited assistance to a relatively wealthy South Africa for “capacity building” was also being trimmed.
While attending official national day receptions with some of South Africa’s immediate neighbours, one entered a looking glass world. Mozambique, Angola and Namibia celebrated their victorious “armed struggles” for independence highlighting the assistance given them by the Soviet Union and East Germany. The national day for the Czech Republic was doubly ironic as tribute was paid to the assistance of a regime that the Czechs themselves had overturned. From the perspective of the ANC, they had won the Cold War and their leaders nostalgically fostered a “liberationist” worldview suspended in amber. The South African government, after having offered diplomatic support to Muammar Khadafy in his armed response to the “Arab Spring,” strongly condemned the bombardment of Khadafy’s forces by NATO, including by Canadian aircraft. DIRCO Deputy Minister Ebrahim Ebrahim would have nothing of the notion that intervention in Libya was to protect protestors opposing Khadafy, in an extension of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. He quoted Thucydides: “The strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.”
Shortly after arriving in South Africa, I heard my new contacts in DIRCO and senior officials in other ministries asking: “What has happened to Canada? Where are you? You are not what you were.” This was not accompanied by any reflection that South Africa might have had a role in what appeared to be a dimming friendship.
Our increasingly brittle rapport came directly into the open in an otherwise minor contretemps over the ANC’s annual January executive meeting. Ambassadors were often invited to attend some public events held on the margins of this meeting. January 8, 2011 was to mark the 99th anniversary of the ANC, and the party was beginning to draw up plans for its centenary. A formal invitation to attend the event was received on Friday, January 7. We made no last-minute plans to go.
The week after, we began to hear through contacts at DIRCO, that Canada’s absence had been specifically and negatively noted. Some references appeared in the media. We decided not to answer the criticisms. In truth, attendance at a governing party’s executive meeting hardly seemed a high priority. Diplomats often seek permission to attend party conventions as observers, as it helps us better understand a country’s politics, but attendance at executive functions risks wandering into a grey area of partisan endorsement. We chose not to say so. Instead, a discreet silence seemed better advised. Nonetheless, government officials began to escalate their expressions of concern about Canada, and it was a clear signal of the Zuma government’s dissatisfaction.
There was more trouble ahead. I had the pleasure of attending a book festival in the town of Richmond where Canadian writer Fred Stenson was to read from The Great Karoo, his novel about Canadians who fought in the 1899 to 1902 Anglo-Boer War. I was surprised when, after his presentation, Ahmed Kathrada, one of the anti-apartheid movement’s most renowned activists, stood in the front row to lambaste Canadian officials for blocking a visit he planned to Canada. This refusal, he said, was due to a Canadian law that labelled the ANC a terrorist organization. Kathrada was eloquent in his accusation that Canada, which had strongly opposed apartheid and imposed economic sanctions against the old regime, was mistreating and disdaining him and so many other freedom fighters who had brought the Rainbow Nation into being. I knew of the proscription against ANC members, but this was the first instance, where I had been present to see Canada publicly castigated in an open forum. Not realizing I was in the room, Kathrada was almost apologetic when I approached him to advise that I had heard his remarks and that I appreciated his frankness. I promised that I would bring his criticisms to the attention of headquarters in Ottawa.
In fact, ANC members were not wholly prohibited from entering Canada. Only those who were members of the ANC before the 1994 election were caught in the net. The ANC had long advocated the overthrow of apartheid by “armed struggle” and such advocacy was seen by Canadian authorities as disqualifying applicants for entry. However, recognizing such a ban applied to the vast number of senior South African officials, including Nelson Mandela himself who was an honorary citizen of Canada, the government devised a scheme of special ministerial permits, known as “national-interest” letters, to over-ride the regulations. This “work-around” did not free the applicant from having to fill out a form acknowledging he or she had once been declared a criminal under
apartheid-era laws. And the delays in receiving authorization through special ministerial permits could be long, causing uncertainty for the traveller and leading even to cancellation of visits. It was the view of high commissioner Dion and later her successor Gaston Barban that action be taken to resolve this matter, which was a significant irritant in the Canada-South Africa relationship.
What happened subsequently is a testimony to the enduring power and frequent intractability of Canadian security authorities. The subject was raised by President Zuma with Canada’s Governor General David Johnston during a state visit to South Africa in May 2013. Liberal MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler extracted from Immigration Minister Jason Kenney a commitment in the House of Commons to resolve the issue. With apparent political will on its side, an interdepartmental committee of officials was convened to find a solution. After months of meetings, a Global Affairs memo on the outcome revealed: “Discussions had been underway with CIC (Citizenship and Immigration Canada) on legislative amendments to the IRPA (Immigration and Refugee Protection Act) to eliminate all restrictions on admissibility based on membership in the ANC. Recently we were informed that these critical amendments did not survive a legal review and will not be implemented.” There was no further follow-up. An immigration official familiar with the matter would later ask me rhetorically: “Do you think the government would want to announce legal amendments resulting in the admission of terrorists?” He did not equate the ANC with terrorism. But he was giving expression to views – apparently very stubbornly held – within certain quarters of the security world. I was astonished by the evidence of such blinkered rigidity.
***
One of the most remarkable features of South African society I discovered was the extraordinary vigour of the media. Newspapers were particularly prominent, including the Mail and Guardian, the Johannesburg Star, the Sunday Times, Business Day, and City Press. The state-owned South African Broadcast Corporation (SABC) was cautious, even tame, but privately-owned broadcasters did not hold back. The business programming that I listened to often on Classic FM pulled few punches. This freewheeling media environment did not please Jacob Zuma however, nor many of his close associates in the ANC. His dissatisfaction led to his call for the creation of a national press council to regulate media. He also backed the creation of an ANC-owned daily The New Age, with the financial backing of the Gupta family, Indian businessmen whose corruption of Zuma and other ANC officials was later confirmed in spectacular fashion during an inquiry following Zuma’s eventual ouster. A controversial journalist who worked for The Sunday Times, Mzilikazi waAfrika, was arrested outside his newspaper’s offices and detained for several days in an unknown location following a series of articles drawing attention to questionable contracting practices of an ANC provincial premier. It was more and more apparent that President Zuma and associates in the ANC were taking steps to infringe on South African press freedom.
High commissioner Dion and I discussed this trend, and she advised that defence of media freedom should become an important theme of the high commission’s outreach. One of the responsibilities of the political section of an embassy is to underline values that “likeminded” countries, such as South Africa and Canada, share. Pressing for respect of human rights abroad is strongly supported by many Canadians. Some see it, rather idealistically, as the very heart of foreign policy. But promotion of human rights is more than altruism; it is part and parcel of strengthening Canada’s international security. Strong democracies rarely go to war against each other. This understanding was very much stressed by Lloyd Axworthy during his tenure as foreign minister between 1996 and 2000. What he described as the “human security agenda” became central to Canadian foreign policy. That Canadian embassies try to promote democratic values and the rule of law within host countries is an application of what is often referred to as “soft power.” Whereas traditionally such activity may have been interpreted as interference in a country’s domestic affairs, it is more often seen today as a legitimate means to influence behaviour and advance pragmatic diplomatic objectives. But that point of view is not always accepted by host countries.
Our concerns about President Zuma’s direction on press freedom were shared by both the United States and the United Kingdom. US Ambassador Don Gip organized an in-house conference of other embassies to review the government’s statements and plans. UK High Commissioner Nicola Brewer agreed with High Commissioner Dion to organize a public seminar on press freedoms and, pertinently, the different forms that press councils take – from state-organized and -supervised to professionally constituted bodies (Where they exist in Canada, they are provincial bodies, organized voluntarily by participating newspapers to adjudicate citizen complaints).
We assembled a roster of international speakers, including from Britain and Canada, and held a two-day seminar at Witwatersrand University. The event provided context to the debate on South Africa’s parliamentary bill on media restrictions, legislation that eventually was focused on security of government information. Free speech advocates managed to fight that bill to a standstill, and the high commission and our diplomatic allies were pleased with the outcome.
Yet I wondered for some time whether at the seminar we’d gone one bridge too far. At the concluding reception, we had invited as feature speaker Jonathan Shapiro, the renowned political cartoonist who published under the pen name of Zapiro. Zapiro’s work on Zuma was fearless and unrestrained. In his cartoons, Zuma always appeared with a shower head attached to his skull – a reminder of the ANC leader’s testimony during his rape trial that, although he had sex unprotected, to avoid AIDs he took a shower afterwards. One of Zapiro’s most famous cartoons depicted Zuma unbuckling his trousers before a supine image of Lady Justice. I don’t think giving Zapiro the premier platform that day would have improved our relations with the presidency, although for conference participants the cartoonist was a star attraction.
***
President Zuma was not subtle when he appointed Mohau Pheko to be South Africa’s new high commissioner to Canada. Pheko was the daughter of a Pan African Congress (PAC) activist. The PAC had been a rival to the ANC during the anti-apartheid struggle. It had played a brave role in key confrontations but had frequently differed strategically from the ANC and unlike the Mandela-led organization, the PAC was not multi-racial; its membership always excluded whites. The appointment was seen nevertheless as acknowledging the PAC’s significant and historic role and particularly of Pheko’s father, Motsoko, who was a onetime PAC president.
Mohau Pheko’s credentials were less than sterling. She claimed a PhD, which happened to come from a dubious US diploma mill, and she had recently been dropped as a columnist from the Johannesburg Star for plagiarism. The high commission discreetly honoured her appointment by offering a lunch at the official residence where she sought to show an earnest interest in education and social development. Shortly after she arrived in Ottawa however, Pheko began a concerted public campaign against the Harper government’s stance on climate change. She certainly had a vulnerable target. The government had little intention of trying to comply with the Chrétien government’s earlier unfulfilled commitment to meet specific targets for reducing greenhouse emissions under the multilateral Kyoto convention. And it was rumoured that Prime Minister Harper would announce Canada’s withdrawal from the climate change agreement. Still, for the new South African high commissioner to publicly confront the government did not win friends and influence people in Ottawa. In a series of interviews given to Canadian media, Pheko accused Peter Kent, then the environment minister, of “bullying” countries to turn against Kyoto ahead of the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to be held in the South African city of Durban in December 2011. She labelled Canada as “a brat” for threatening to pull out of the agreement.5
I made an appointment with John Davies, then the director in DIRCO of Canada-US relations. The high commission wanted to know whether the South African ambassador was “free-lancing” or whether she was expressing the official views of the government. Davies, a consummately courteous long-term veteran of the diplomatic service, did not give me a clear answer, promising to inquire further through his chain of command. But I underlined that, as he well knew, it is generally assumed that ambassadors are speaking under the instructions of their governments.
That weekend Kent arrived in Johannesburg en route to the Durban conference. In the airport’s VIP lounge, his staff passed on to me instructions from the Prime Minister’s office for the high commission to go in again to DIRCO to formally protest Pheko’s behaviour. With high commissioner Dion already in Durban, I was to be the messenger. I returned to see Davies to express Canada’s considerable disappointment with the high commissioner’s publicly critical statements. Having to scold the comportment of an ambassador is a rare event. But Pheko’s public campaign was also highly unusual. Ambassadors usually find more discreet ways to deliver their government’s messages. It gave me no pleasure to complain of her posturing, and it did not bode well for an improvement in a bilateral relationship that was already suffering badly.
Upon his return from Durban, Kent announced, as had been rumoured, Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. Those livid over the Harper government’s climate change stance may have applauded Pheko’s criticism. But from the perspective of effective diplomacy, where strong messages can be delivered directly to interlocutors behind closed doors while keeping powder dry to further future interests, Pheko tossed out the proverbial handbook. Recognizing that her usefulness in Ottawa was so quickly squandered, President Zuma, before too long, re-assigned her as ambassador to Japan.
***
Although no diplomatic “irritant” compared to the Pheko affair, there were others that still made our lives difficult. In 2011, the President of Côte D’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo, was vanquished in a United Nations-supervised democratic election. He refused to cede power. The Economic Union of West African States and the African Union endorsed the election results, which delivered Gbagbo’s rival Allesame Outtara 54 per cent of the national vote. Gbagbo’s refusal to step down accompanied by military manoeuvres that physically isolated Outtara and his closest followers presaged the outbreak of a new civil war. South Africa’s response to Gbagbo’s recalcitrance was not to condemn it, but to dispatch former president Thabo Mbeki to try to negotiate a government of national unity.
Canada found Gbagbo’s ploy to retain power egregious and South Africa’s initiative retrograde. Foreign Affairs’ director general for Africa, Isabelle Roy, was dispatched to Pretoria, and I accompanied her to a meeting with DIRCO’s Mdu Lembede, chief director for West Africa. “This goes beyond a local matter,” Roy said. “It’s a major democratic process important to the world generally . . . It is time for Gbagbo to leave peacefully.” But Lembede was evasive; he cast doubt on the veracity of the UN-declared election results. “We do not have the facts to make a judgement on the issue. There are so many conflicting stories.” It seemed South Africa saw a democratic transition of power as dispensable, that it could be put aside in the greater interest, in their view, of the cessation of violence. In this, they were following their model in neighbouring Zimbabwe when in 2009, Morgan Tsvangirai was forced into a power-sharing government with Robert Mugabe, even though election results indicated the latter had lost the election. Ironically, many ANC commentators on foreign policy were drawing revisionist lessons from their recent history. They pointed to the negotiations between the whites-only National Party government and the democratic coalition led by the ANC as the key to South Africa’s transition to a non-racial democracy. Emphasizing the talks and not the principles, or the clear fact that the anti-apartheid struggle had been made more potent by the often harshly violent “people’s war,” was remarkably disingenuous. It had become a vogue for ANC members to refer to their policies as being inspired by the Zulu/Xhosa concept of “ubuntu” which refers to seeking social harmony in a shared humanity. I attended a seminar at the University of Pretoria where a South African academic compared ubuntu to Confucianism and its stress on the need to favour harmony over conflict. We are aware today of how the Communist Party of China, giving voice to similar allegedly Confucian precepts, subsumes the rights of individuals within a harmonious, yet authoritarian political structure. Roy appealed to Lembede “to support values and principles;” she meant upholding the results of a democratic election. The corollary was that applying them could mean Gbagbo’s forcible removal from office, which South Africa would not endorse. In the end, Gbagbo was removed from office in April 2011 by forces supporting Ouattara, backed by French and UN armed forces. He was arraigned before the International Criminal Court but acquitted in 2019. Ouattara went on to win re-election in 2015, chalking up 83.7 per cent of the vote.
***
Canada’s trade relations with South Africa were managed by my energetic colleague, Barbara Giacomin, the senior trade commissioner, who was based 45 minutes from Pretoria in Johannesburg, South Africa’s business hub. With her staff of Canadian and locally hired trade commissioners, it was her job to find opportunities for sales and investment by Canadian companies in South Africa. Mining suppliers and engineering firms were prominent among Giacomin’s clients. Trade promotion was not central to my role, but I would become involved in commercial files when they were affected by government policies or regulations.
SNC Lavalin, the Canadian engineering firm which had taken over the previously Crown-owned Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., as well as several other engineering firms, was interested in the prospective development of nuclear power in South Africa. South Africa already had significant nuclear assets. Two nuclear power stations were operated at Koeberg in the Western Cape, and a research reactor was located west of Pretoria at Pelindaba. South Africa’s capabilities had permitted the apartheid regime to build six nuclear bombs in the ’70s, later decommissioned during the transition to democracy, making South Africa the only country ever to have possessed and then destroyed its nuclear weaponry. I once had to visit the Pelindaba site to discuss with the facility’s director Rob Adam international cooperation on the production of medical nuclear isotopes. In 2009, there was a world shortage, and Canada, with facilities in Chalk River, Ontario, and South Africa were cooperating to maintain a vital world supply. The potential for Canadian firms to participate in a South African nuclear power program was dependent, from Canada’s perspective, on the signature of a nuclear cooperation agreement that would hold the signatories to peaceful uses and certain technical conditions, including a limitation on the percentage concentration of enriched uranium in any project. A draft agreement had been negotiated before I arrived in South Africa, but it became difficult for us to understand, as the months wore on, why we couldn’t get South African officials to the table for the final signature. When we asked, our contacts at DIRCO explained that other departments in the government had responsibility for finalizing the text and having it vetted by authorities in the justice ministry. As time wore on, however, answers to our inquiries became increasingly circular, if not byzantine, and we realized we would have to engage senior decisionmakers and activate some political will.
A visit to South Africa by our deputy minister of foreign affairs, Morris Rosenberg, provided just that opportunity. Barbara Thompson, an elected member of parliament and the deputy minister of energy, agreed to meet us in Cape Town. We arrived at a small hotel conference room where a sumptuous spread of hors d’oeuvres and sweets had been laid out on a large buffet table. We were rather astonished since the meeting was intended as a working session to get to the bottom of whatever reservations the South Africans were still harbouring.
About half an hour after the scheduled start of the meeting, the South African deputy minister arrived trailing a retinue of some dozen aides and junior officials. Everyone took a plate from the lavish buffet to at least acknowledge the courtesy being offered. Then Rosenberg moved to the business at hand. To our amazement, Minister Thompson seemed entirely unaware of any of the preceding efforts to identify the source of obstruction to the agreement. Then she turned to one of her aides to comment on the specific issue of the percentage threshold of enriched uranium. He had no specifics to provide either and unhelpfully undertook to consult officials in another ministry in the days to come. I probably surprised Rosenberg after the meeting when on the street and out of earshot of our hosts, I declared intemperately that the minister was either unacceptably ignorant or plainly lying.
The high commission had followed extensive diplomatic exchanges between the South African government and Iran, including mutual exchanges of high-level visits of large government delegations. There was also some evident Iranian interest in investing in uranium holdings that had once been held by Canadian investors. We were uneasy that some South Africans may have seen opportunities to participate in Iran’s production of highly enriched uranium for a weapons program. (This preceded the eventual agreement of the United States and several European Union countries with Iran to curtail Iran’s weapons program.)
But South Africa’s reluctance to engage with us may have been more related to the deal that President Zuma was intent on developing with Russia to build a whole new fleet of nuclear reactors. Without a nuclear cooperation agreement, Canadian would-be investors would have been unable to bid on either reactor construction or even to supply technology or services. Several years later, Zuma’s intentions in this area caused a rupture in his government when the South African treasurer Pravin Gordhan refused to endorse the necessary expenditures for Russian-built reactors. Zuma’s single-minded attempts to drive his nuclear ambitions forward became one of the key factors that led to his resignation. The president’s pointedly ignoring my face-to-face petition in Cape Town in 2011 was a silent evasion, for he was focused on bigger game.
***
There was one area during my four-year assignment in which cooperation between our governments never faltered. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, the G20 had agreed on measures to strengthen the world financial infrastructure. The banking systems of Canada and South Africa were among the few that suffered little damage during the crisis, partly due to strong prudential regulations. Neither country ventured far into the vast market of financial derivatives, many based on a dangerously mortgaged property sector, that lay at the base of the financial collapse. In advance of each G20 meeting, I was dispatched to the South African treasury to confirm whether Canada and South Africa shared perspectives regarding next moves to solidify the international finance. Among the key commitments made in the G20 was to strengthen national banking systems under the so-called Basel 3 rules to increase both bank capitalization and reserves. My meetings at Treasury were always a pleasure since both Canada and South Africa were at the forefront of efforts to comply. This was not a surprise, since during the nearly two decades of multi-racial democracy, South Africa’s finance ministers had been diligent in maintaining balanced books, keeping government debt in tight check. Our common perspectives represented a calm oasis of mutual understanding in what otherwise had become a fractious relationship. Unfortunately, there were no guarantees that the South African treasury would remain an institution of economic orthodoxy within the South African state and the degree of cooperation was in fact an aberration in a broadly strained relationship.
In retrospect, we were witnessing in South Africa a deep suspicion of the multilateral consensus that had so characterized the post-Cold War years. While going through the motions in its relations with Canada – as with the United States and the European Union as well – President Zuma’s administration was more attracted to the policies of the state-dominated BRIC economies, Russia and China in particular. There was frustration in the ANC that, after years of supposedly market-oriented economic policies, South Africa had made little headway in reducing the widespread poverty of much of its black population. In that, the attitudes of many in the ANC were aligned with that of many citizen movements world-wide, disappointed that economic growth was not distributing its benefits in a more equitable fashion. How then to intelligently engage South Africa? Could a consensus embracing multilateralism be restored in face of the centrifugal forces of more authoritarian and protectionist attitudes worldwide? My faith in the future of South Africa and President Zuma’s international choices was being stretched thin. Could Canada and South Africa become compatible partners again?