U.S. Attacks South Africa For Its Moral Leadership & China Alliance

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and Chinese President Xi Jinping (courtesy of the Pan African Review.

The Republic of South Africa has been under attack in 2024, by the 118^th United States Congress. Thses attacks may escalate in the new Republican administration.

Congressman John James (R-MI), sponsored H.R. 7256-HR7256/text– earlier this year, which was voted up by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and may become law in a vote by the full Congress before the end of this year. South Africa is accused of threatening U.S. security by maintaining a dialogue with the Republic of Iran, the Russian Federation, and People’s Republic of China, all of which are members of the BRICS. In H.R. 7256, Naledi Pandor, then South African Foreign Minister, is singled out. South African President, President Cyril Ramaphosa, and Pandor are also vilified for bringing Israel’s genocidal behavior against the Palestinian people to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a United Nations created court. Cong. James also criticizes South Africa for participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. His proposed legislation recommends, that upon review by the State and Defense Departments, South Africa could be removed from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

On October 29, 2024, six Republican Congressman wrote to President Biden:

Pretoria [South Africa] has consistently failed to demonstrate a consistent fidelity to the rule of law and routinely takes measures to undermine our nation’s vital security interests – both clearly contradict AGOA eligibility requirements…and merit re-evaluation of South Africa’s inclusion as a beneficiary sub-Saharan African country

In this over the top assault, the letter also accuses South Africa of filing a “baseless claim” before the ICJ. The final paragraph exposes the motivation of these Congressman:

South Africa’s unmitigated embrace of the Chinese Communist Party raises further national security concerns and a present challenge. At the urging of the People’s Republic of China, South Africa is preparing to close Taiwan’s representative office in Pretoria by the end of the month. Under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), the President conducts an annual review of beneficiary states. As you conduct this statutorily prescribed annual review, we urge you to re-evaluate whether South Africa should continue to benefit from AGOA preference benefits, and make it known to the South African authorities that they risk losing these benefits if they pursue this unjustified course of action against Taiwan. There is no reason why our nation should continue providing economic benefits to a country that consistently and proudly prioritizes the interests of Beijing and Moscow over America’s. (emphasis added)

There is speculation that President Trump will make an example out of South Africa and punish South Africa politically by removing it from AGOA. This scenario is not farfetched. Trump has already declared he will wage war on the BRICS, if he believes they are undermining the supremacy of the dollar in currency transactions among themselves. Also, President Biden has used AGOA, a commercial trade agreement, to politically punish African nations, including Ethiopia. We shall see if the new president ironically follows in the footsteps of his predecessor.

Anti-apartheid leader and African National Congress, ANC member Nelson Mandela raises his fist while addressing a crowd in Tokoza, during his tour of townships, Sept. 5, 1990 (courtesy voanews.com)

Why South Africa Targeted?
The dominance of the rules based order’s diseased ideology of a zero-sum world of political relationships, has put South Africa in the crosshairs of the U.S. Its political-economic association with the nations that Washington characterizes as the “axis of evil,” especially China, have made South Africa a victim of U.S. animus.

As an early member of the BRICS, the first African nation to join this new formation, South Africa has played a special leadership role in the Global South.

South Africa’s historic struggle for liberation from apartheid, led by Nelson Mandella, has given South Africa the fortitude to express its moral outrage against oppression. It is not surprising that South Africa, of all nations, brought to the ICJ, the criminal oppression of the Palestinians in Gaza, by Israel. Nor should one be shocked by the vile response of the U.S. led rules-based order, to this courageous act by South Africa.

To understand why South Africa, China, and the BRICS, are targets of the rules-based order, one has to comprehend the changing dynamic in the world. The so called developed northern nations, the G-7, are experiencing the decline of their hegemony over the rest of the nations of the world. The BRICS-22 nations comprise a majority of the world’s population. The nations of the Global South, endowed with the majority of the planet’s natural resources, including critical minerals, are beginning to assert their rightful prominence. It is imperative today, at this historic juncture in the world, for the Global South to lead a movement to create a new just economic system, a new paradigm of development, for the benefit of all people of all nations.

Below is an excerpt from a discussion with Naledi Pandor, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation for South Africa, 2019-2024. Pandor eloquently expresses the aspirations of South Africa, and the Global South:

We should encourage a new human relation across the world; one that is devoted to empowering all human beings and ensuring that we develop a more prosperous, a more engaged, a more skilled humanity able to address the fundamental problems that confront all of us.

Grace Naledi Pandor, at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC, March 19, 2024.

The following is an edited transcript of Her Excellency Naledi Pandor’s presentation to Panel 1 of the Dec.7-8 Schiller Institute conference, featured in EIR magazine December 13, 2024

Our world today is experiencing a most profound and disruptive level of toxic politics, dominated by aggressive self-interest and neglect of the value of global cooperation. Multilateral bodies such as the United Nations have not been able to respond decisively. And the most powerful organ of the United Nations, the Security Council, is held hostage by great power competition and uneven use of the veto. Many commentators have referred to the past five years as a most toxic geopolitical environment, testing international relations and fraying long-established bonds that helped to avoid a world war for more than five decades. The period is also viewed by some as an inflection point, a period that offers up room for a new collective of progressive ideas that will seek to put people rather than interests first.

The South Must Step Up
There is hope that the South will step up. The concept of “South” is a contested one, as the region does not have a coherent connected grouping of nations with a shared hegemony such as exists with nations of the North. So, we are still grappling with the meaning and unity of the South. There are, however, promising signs of the emergence of new formations and policy perspectives. For example, South Africa has shown a positive commitment to international law and to the United Nations system, through its approach to the International Court of Justice in the effort to end the ongoing war against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian Territories. South Africa, in doing this, placed human rights and concern for those who suffer harm at the forefront of its foreign policy actions.

This was reminiscent of former President Nelson Mandela, who played a key role in several peace initiatives on the continent of Africa, and who shaped South Africa’s foreign policy as one that is based on the concern for others, on the promotion of human rights, and on international solidarity. So, “I care for you, because you care for me.” This relates to a very ancient African philosophy of Ubuntu, which means “I am human because you recognize in action my humanity.”

BRICS Summit, Kazan Russia, October 2024 (courtesy voanews.com).

A second positive development is the increased maturing of the BRICS forum into an expanded body that seeks a more inclusive approach in global politics and international partnerships. BRICS has emerged as a positive forum in that it seeks to discuss new ideas on key issues such as science, innovation, trade, international financing, and the development of the South. The establishment of the BRICS New Development Bank and its early success give further hope for the creation of new institutions and new practices.

One of the realities…the critical importance of science and innovation, is that grant funding to Africa rarely includes funding for research, funding for innovation capacity, funding for advancing science on the African continent.

We also believe that devoted attention to United Nations reform and democratization of the Security Council is another positive opportunity that we should use to reshape world relations. The General Assembly meeting of last September committed to advancing reform processes, and to making the Security Council more effective, more efficient, more democratic, and more representative.

Lastly, I believe the task of the next five decades is certainly the adoption of workable strategies for the fundamental transformation of Africa. Our continent has to address the difficult challenges of inequality, poverty, and joblessness. Africa has a significant, impatient youth population, eager to achieve a prosperous, democratic, empowering Africa. The global community should therefore work closely with our African Union to advance implementation of our African blueprint for development, Agenda 2063. In this blueprint, we set out the critical areas of development, including water, renewable energy resources, infrastructure, and logistics for intra-African trade, agriculture, and food security. And we require that our partners should provide support to the continent to enhance capacity for implementation of this development agenda. We don’t need new plans; we need to make sure that existing plans are effective and that they work to the good of Africa, to the good of all humanity in the South.

(Courtesy of Wikipedia)
We believe that the South can be a source of progress, of peace and security. Countries of the South should embrace democracy, the practice of human rights, and respect for international law as key guarantees of the means to end the toxicity of power competition that has truly eroded human relations. In fact, the erosion of respect for human rights, of respect for international law, poses a very serious threat to the practice of science, because undemocratic governments hate the honesty of scientific research, hate the opportunity of innovation. And thus, it is incumbent on all of us to adopt the ideas set out in the Schiller Institute development framework to really ensure that all the aspects of human endeavor which advance human progress are embraced by governments in the South as well as governments in the North.

We should encourage a new human relation across the world; one that is devoted to empowering all human beings and ensuring that we develop a more prosperous, a more engaged, a more skilled humanity able to address the fundamental problems that confront all of us. Because alongside the problems, we have a human capacity—an ingenuity—of problem resolution; and we need to unite in drawing that capacity together and ensuring that we use international relations to resolve the problems of the world…

I think the notion of preparing for war is a very poor example of leadership. What we should be preparing for is using our innate abilities in order to advance the world. We’re at a point where many countries hold very worrying and lethal weapons. I come from South Africa, which is a country that agreed to destroy the nuclear weapons that it had had the opportunity to build in the apartheid era. One of the first decisions of the new government headed by Nelson Mandela was that we would be against the holding of nuclear weapons. And that while we have nuclear scientific capability, it would be put to peaceful purposes and not be directed to weaponizing South Africa against any country in Africa or any part of the world.

So, I believe that what we need is fresh thinking. We need a civil society, and particularly intellectual organizations, to be more visible and vocal in presenting alternative perspectives on how we should view the world, and setting out from research clear examples of what we can anticipate should we go the route of a negative confrontation between the most powerful in the world. This will harm all of us. If the great powers are able to reach a rapprochement, it will allow for enhanced development, particularly of the poorest countries of the South. It will set the world on a very new trajectory and would offer an opportunity for real change and independence that we’ve not had since the beginnings of the end of imperialism and colonialism on the African continent.

So, this environment, while toxic, offers a new opportunity to engage in a very different way through international relations in building new partnerships among all the various regions of the world. But it is the most powerful who must make the decision to do something positive. Otherwise, they are going to generate a reaction which will lead to the destruction of the world and increased world instability as we are seeing from week to week in different parts of the world today….

Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, Beijing, September 2024 (courtesy of semafor.com)

China’s Role in Africa
Well, firstly it’s absolutely untrue that China has a colonial relationship with the African continent. In fact, through the partnership with China, many African countries have achieved a level of infrastructure development that they would not have achieved in the past 15 years, had it not been for resources provided from financial lenders in China.

What we have seen though more recently is rather than state-owned companies being the provider of grant or loan funding to African countries, it has become much more the private sector of China taking up that role. So, there have been concerns about increased indebtedness of African countries, but I think it’s an absolute creative imagination that suggests a similar relationship to the colonial experience. The roads that we see in several African countries, the development of railways, the building of bridges, the enhancement of port infrastructure are very different from the trade character of African countries under colonialism.

In the context of the G20, there is now much closer discussion about how the more developed countries, which include China as a G20 member, could collaborate more effectively in enhancing support to African countries. I think that’s a very positive development. Nonetheless, China remains a significant trading partner for the African continent, both in terms of exports from Africa, which are largely commodities, but also imports from China into Africa.

The change to the private sector has seen the establishment of local business plants in the African continent, so adding some productive capacity, which has for many decades been a desire of Africa. So, I think it remains a positive relationship. The issue of funding and particularly the growth in private sector debt is an area that many countries’ governments are now having to pay close attention to. But it is very different from the underdevelopment that we saw in the imperial and colonial periods. (emphasis added)

To read the full discussion click: Pandor

Read my earlier posts below:
South African Minister Pandor Speaks On Importance BRICS Economic Cooperation

South African Minister Pandor Speaks ”Truth to Power” in U.S.

South African Minister Pandor Articulates Principles of Development for Africa

Freeman Interview: Is The West’s Rules-Based Order Targeting Horn of Africa and South Africa?

A belated Happy Birthday to Ludwig van Beethoven, December 16, 1770, and an early Happy New Year to all!

Lawrence Freeman is a Political-Economic Analyst for Africa, who has been involved in economic development policies for Africa for 35 years. He is a teacher, writer, public speaker, and consultant on Africa. Mr. Freeman strongly believes that economic development is an essential human right. He is the creator of the blog: lawrencefreemanafricaandtheworld.com, and also publishing on: lawrencefreeman.substack.com, “Freeman’s Africa and the Worl