When a young Cyril Ramaphosa and his ANC comrades faced Roelf Meyer and his National Party colleagues in the early 1990s to negotiate a democratic settlement for SA, it was not a meeting of equals. It was a meeting of those who were right and those who were wrong.
The Nats, in power for nearly half a century, had ruthlessly implemented the racist apartheid system which was condemned across the globe as a crime against humanity. The ANC, in exile for decades, had fought for a nonracial, democratic, nonsexist, unitary state.
The ANC was on the right side of history. The Nats, shunned by the world and facing revolt within the country, had a choice: continue as a pariah of the world or do the right thing.
For those negotiations to succeed, no-one needed to lie to the Nats that they were holy. Facing up to the truth did not collapse those negotiations.
This is where Ramaphosa is wrong in his attempts to broker a deal in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Ramaphosa is burying his head in the sand, refusing to acknowledge that it is possible to tell the truth about what is happening in that region and still be able to get all the players around a table. His mission will fail because he refuses to call a spade a spade.
Words matter. When Russia invades Ukraine, it is not a "special military operation", as Russian officials refer to it. It is not a "situation", as Ramaphosa calls it. It is an unjustified invasion of a sovereign state in which a militarily superior entity shells civilian buildings, bombs nuclear facilities and drives more than a million people into exile. Seeing the truth for what it is and describing it as it is does not make one weak. It makes one incredibly powerful.
Ramaphosa, an experienced negotiator, seems to be oblivious to this simple truth. This is a man who in the 1980s would tell mineworkers the truth about their situation providing labour in the mines, and who would then go back and negotiate with mining bosses.
Ramaphosa will come to any negotiation as Putin’s pawn and not as an honest broker
Yet, even with this background, Ramaphosa wants us to accept that he believes there are two evenly matched protagonists in Ukraine. In this utopia he inhabits, Russia is morally on a par with Ukraine. This is false. Ukraine, a sovereign state, is being pummelled and destroyed by an aggressor, which is Russia. Pretending that this is not happening makes a settlement impossible.
It makes any kind of mediation Ramaphosa might undertake dishonest and a sham. Imagine if Ramaphosa and Meyer had gone to the many mediation projects they have undertaken — from Belfast to Sri Lanka — with the attitude that the bully was on a par with the victim. Such an attitude would have seen them kicked out at the very first chance by whoever was participating in such talks.
I understand that Ramaphosa must be diplomatic. Yet diplomacy is saying the hard stuff without offending. It is not an avoidance of the hard stuff. In Ramaphosa’s world the hard stuff is never mentioned. Instead, he is coddling the aggressor. By doing so, he has made himself weak because he is seen as being in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, whose ambassador in SA has been isolated by Pretoria, will by now be aware that Ramaphosa will come to any negotiation as Putin’s pawn and not as an honest broker.
A legitimate mediator would be talking to both Putin and Zelensky. Our Ramaphosa only speaks to the Russians. By the time Ramaphosa goes to the Ukrainians, they will have him pegged as just a Putin puppet. Would they be wrong?
All this is very familiar. When SA was allegedly mediating in the Zimbabwean crisis in the late 2000s, the ANC behaved as if it were Robert Mugabe’s personal assistant. The man barked and the ANC leadership jumped a kilometre high. He tortured opposition leaders and the ANC kept schtum. That’s why all that failed. The ANC was coddling a dictator.
It’s doing it again with Putin.
The result is that SA’s mediation efforts — if they ever take off — will simply fail because they were built on dishonesty about what we are dealing with here.
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