Jacob Zuma is in Britain this week, paying lip service to the West. But, says Alec Russell, his vision for South Africa’s future is of ever closer ties with the emerging superpower
When Jacob Zuma addressed the banquet at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday night, he will have nodded at his host and saluted the Commonwealth. South Africa’s President is a stickler for traditional protocol. He also has warm memories of his flits through London when he was in exile under apartheid and the UK was a home from home for many in the ‘struggle’.
Yet Zuma’s audiences should not be misled by his anecdotal after-dinner repertoire. The one-time herd boy turned freedom-fighter turned president may have a reputation for populism, vacillation and scandal. But he is also a shrewd politician. While he has nodded courteously to the old colonial overlord in his state visit, he has long since calculated that the future for Africa may lie with China, as much as if not more than with the West. However embarrassing his latest indiscretion — a love-child, born even as the ANC prepared to launch a one-partner campaign to combat Aids — the challenge for commentators is not to get so diverted by his traditional ways, in particular his proud embrace of polygamy, that they lose sight of this critical geopolitical shift.
Zuma’s visit, just under a year after he took power, comes at a critical time for relations between South Africa and the West. He may be something of an equivocator over economic policy, but he has from his earliest days in power made very clear one key belief: the merits of being close to Beijing. He was in charge of the party, and effectively the country, when the Dalai Lama was controversially refused a visa to South Africa. His rationale was simple: China is an increasingly important ally. As he told two colleagues of mine in Pretoria last week, if Britain wants to remain relevant in Africa it will have to change its ways. The old paternalist attitude, still apparent in the Blair era, is long since outdated, he indicated. China, by contrast, has a more attractive style: ‘coming as an equal partner saying let us do business...’
The dramatic tale of China’s re-engagement with Africa in the past decade has over the last year or so been well if somewhat simplistically told. In short, to the increasing consternation of Western businesspeople and diplomats, China has made a concerted drive across the continent to extend commercial and political links. The new ‘scramble’ for Africa — which India and Brazil are racing to join — has its rough edges. Hungry for raw materials to fuel its economy, in many deals China has offered cheap loans and infrastructure in return for minerals, and has turned a blind eye to the nature of its African partners. Yet while locals have sometimes complained of mistreatment by Chinese overseers, in many countries China has filled an important gap. As Zuma said last week: ‘If the old countries [former colonial powers] did not develop the countries in Africa, but China comes to Africa and it is ready to build roads, bridges, everything. What must they [African countries] do?’
Under Zuma’s predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, South Africa had an ambiguous role in this narrative. He favoured the ‘south-south’ partnership, as the leaders of the reincarnation of the old non-aligned pact like to style themselves, and had a prickly relationship with the West. Yet he also believed in keeping a distance from Beijing. South Africa needed neither cheap credit nor infrastructure. It also feared that Chinese garments would destroy the local textile industry. Mbeki once even cautioned that Africa needed to guard against falling into a ‘colonial relationship’ with China.
Shortly after Zuma’s arrival in London I asked him about Mbeki’s warning. He broadly endorsed it, saying Africa had to be cautious over how it approached the new relationship, to ensure it was not a ‘substitute’ for the old relationship with Europe. But his actions speak for themselves. With the talks at the Copenhagen climate change conference close to collapse, on the last night President Barack Obama called on the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. When he arrived, however, he found that Mr Wen was already meeting three leaders of the developing world, India’s Manmohan Singh, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Zuma. For Brazil and India to be there was unsurprising. They, with China, are the emerging powerhouses. South Africa, with its far smaller economy, was very much the odd one out.
But Zuma had sensed an opportunity. European officials had believed he was amenable to their perspective as they pushed for hard commitments from big polluters. Instead they found he was with China. South Africans like to think that the gathering marked the launch of a new grouping entrenching their presence at the top table: ‘Basic’ — Brazil, South Africa, India and China.
Last month, under a blazing southern January sun, one of Zuma’s confidants sketched out a vision of South Africa’s future as one with increasingly close ties to Beijing. He was speaking in the shadow of the Union Buildings in Pretoria, where the Afrikaner Nationalists had planned so many foreign policy initiatives under apartheid. Then the objective had been to cleave as close as possible to the West by presenting South Africa as a bulwark against communism. Now Pretoria’s priorities are very different. China was not only the coming world power, the confidant said. Its belief in state-run capitalism offered invaluable lessons for the ANC in the aftermath of the humbling of the western free-market model.
Month by month the relationship deepens. In late 2007 China made the largest single foreign investment in South Africa since the end of apartheid, a deal for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the biggest lending bank in Asia, to take a 20 per cent stake in South Africa’s Standard Bank, the country’s largest by assets. Last year China emerged as South Africa’s foremost trading partner. Now an adviser is considering presenting Zuma with a plan for a ‘Chinese’ style alternative to orthodox economic policies, and even to discuss the idea of intervention in the value of the rand. The ideas would almost certainly be rejected out of hand by the Treasury, but they are straws in the wind.
In Britain, businesspeople and commentators tend to see South Africa through the prism of decades of African failures, and fret accordingly at the turmoil and culture of acquisitiveness in the ANC. But visitors from India, China and Brazil see a fellow developing economy and a land of business opportunities. Pretoria can be close to Beijing and the West. British officials hope that in international forums South Africa could become a bridge to China. The challenge they face, however, is to convince Zuma that he should not fly home at the end of his state visit asking himself why he has spent the better part of a week in one of the tired economies of western Europe — rather than in one of the booming economies in the East.
Alec Russell is world news editor of the Financial Times and author of After Mandela: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa.