It’s extraordinary how little we know or understand – or apparently care – about places on our own doorstep, writes Peter Fabricius.
Pretoria - We are supposedly living in a global village, or so the cliché goes. But the really extraordinary thing about South Africa is how little we know or understand – or apparently care – about places on our own doorstep.
In so many ways we know a lot more about distant places than nearer ones. We could be said to be suffering not from myopia but its opposite, hyperopia, an inability to focus on close things.
Lesotho, for example, is the only country in the world entirely surrounded by another country, South Africa, so we ought to know it very well.
Yet the mutinies, coups, political assassinations and other extraordinary events of the past year each continue to catch us off guard, even though they had all been brewing for ages before they erupted. After the unexpected coup attempt of last August, South Africa got involved and brokered an early election.
But then the former army commander was assassinated in cold blood last month. Why didn’t we see that coming?
In Swaziland, another landlocked country on our doorstep, though in this case it is also cut off from the sea by Mozambique, bizarre things happen all the time.
The judge president locks up a journalist and a lawyer for criticisising his outrageous handling of a case. They languish in jail for a year and it is only when the judge president is found to be embezzling state funds, that the case against the journalist and lawyer is finally thrown out of court.
In the case of Mozambique, another country on our doorstep, South Africa’s hyperopia is aggravated by what (some) might call the lusophone curtain. The fact that the country mainly speaks and writes Portuguese renders events there even more opaque than they would be otherwise.
Every so often the old civil war between the ruling Frelimo and its historical arch-enemy Renamo erupts again into violence, yet this dramatic recidivism hardly causes a ripple on this side of the border.
And it seems extraordinary that Mozambique has built up a substantial industry across the border from the Kruger National Park to kill our rhinos and sell their horns to the East, with so little fuss from here.
That industry is decimating our rhino population and threatening to dent our lucrative tourist industry. But nothing – or nothing very effective – is done about it. The government in Maputo apparently regards it as a legitimate development project which helps to placate part of its population.
Right now Mozambique is headed into perilous financial waters as the government prepares to rescue the controversial state tuna-fishing company, Ematum, from imminent collapse.
Ematum bought about 30 vastly-overpriced boats from France for about the equivalent of R10 billion and the government underwrote the bond. Now, as the journal Africa Confidential reports, the whole deal is unravelling and it looks as though it was all just a front for some politicians and security officials to start a maritime security business to protect oil rigs.
Ematum has made no real money fishing and the government will have to step in to foot the large bill. Repaying this huge bill threatens the financial stability of the country, the journal says, because the much-anticipated windfall from recent discoveries of large gas reserves is far from coming on steam.
Does anyone in Pretoria fret about potential financial implosion on our doorstep? Or is that, like dealing with the rhino-poachers, considered a sovereignty issue, to be left to the Mozambican government to deal with on its own?
South Africa prides itself on its ability to “punch above its weight” in foreign policy, and last week we saw further evidence of that as President Jacob Zuma basked in the limelight cast by the leaders of South Africa’s gigantic fellow-members of the Brics club.
That’s all very well. But maybe what we really need is a lot more of punching below our weight.
Independent Foreign Service