International diplomacy is sometimes about the small things: punctuality; the correct form of address; sensitivity to local customs — naming conventions, say.
It’s not about dropping 12 crates of weapons and 120 highly trained police and special forces personnel on the tarmac of a foreign country without the requisite permits.
It’s not about accusing the host nation of standing in the way of global peace when it takes offence. And it’s not about deflecting attention from your own ineptitude by blaming your predicament on racism. (It is possible, after all, to be both incompetent and a victim of racism all at once.)
Yet this is exactly what happened when a planeload of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Pretorian guard and journalists were stranded on the runway of Chopin airport in Warsaw.
An ill-fated mission if ever there was one. Stuck in South Africa first, unable to cadge a plane; refused entry into Italian airspace; that minor international incident in Poland; barred from Hungarian airspace; unable to catch up with Ramaphosa’s African peace mission in Kyiv; turning back before reaching Russia. In short — a phalanx of presidential protectors unable to protect.
Still, if the world was growing weary of the now tedious game of “Where is Wally?”, Ramaphosa could at least send in the clown. Enter presidential spokesperson Vincent Magwenya.
To start, it’s considered polite to call the capital of your host country by the name of its choosing, not that of a violent occupying force. Kyiv, say, not Kiev. Yet if Twitter is anything to go by, no-one told the president, the presidency or the person responsible for all those comms — Magwenya himself.
Sadly, it overshadowed the African leaders’ mission itself, and the sensible ‘confidence-building measures’ to come from it
That may have given Ukrainians pause to contemplate South Africa’s “neutrality” on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But then Magwenya went properly, majestically, rogue.
As Russia lobbed missiles at the Ukraine capital — and Ramaphosa was hustled into a bomb shelter — his intrepid doctor of spin claimed it was all lies. He said he saw nothing other than people going about their daily business. Tellingly, it seems he cannot believe that amid the business of death, people can get on with life.
Wait till someone tells him that a city under bombardment can have electricity, and trains that run on time.
In any event, we may take at face value Magwenya’s “see no evil” point (one he is stubbornly clinging to). But he has yet to walk back his most noxious statement: his smug musing that the “so-called explosions” were “deliberate misinformation” — “outright amusing even”. Tell that to Kyiv’s residents.
What the first incident makes crisp is that the government has the organisational ability of Rudy Giuliani, and a Pontius Pilate-like ability to wash its hands of responsibility. The second, its lack of understanding of the very basics of diplomacy, and a lack of empathy for those under siege.
Sadly, it overshadowed the African leaders’ mission itself, and the sensible “confidence-building measures” to come from it: prisoner exchanges, for example, the return of children to their home states, respecting territorial sovereignty.
Still, this mission is unlikely to show much success, not least since the zero-sum game seems too entrenched at this point. Which makes all the more salient Ramaphosa’s point that “all wars, in the end, do come to an end”. They do so by annihilation, capitulation and attrition. And by diplomacy.
But if the weekend’s farce is anything to go by, South Africa won’t be the country to perform this magical feat of mediation. If global diplomacy is an ocean, South Africa has just put on its water wings.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.