SLR: Lamola's Washington strategy could push South Africa further out in the cold

Foreign minister Ronald Lamola is in the United States while Washington turns up the pressure on Pretoria. Columnist Simon Lincoln Reader argues he is spending that time with the wrong people. Sanctions have been announced, but Lamola and DIRCO director-general Zane Dangor are not engaging decision-makers or rallying African and European allies. Instead, they have appeared at activist-led forums, including an event at New York's Riverside Church whose invitation carried the Brand South Africa logo. Reader argues this aligns South Africa with anti-American views that most South Africans do not share. He warns it risks further damage to relations with a key trading partner..This article was first published by The Common Sense.By Simon Lincoln Reader.The behaviour of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) in Washington is analogous to a man with C-grade contacts trying to get help hiding the body of the wife he has just murdered. There Ronald Lamola and Zane Dangor are, scrambling across the political landscape seeking to vacuum all the internal anti-American sentiment they can find. But they have mistaken social warlords and intemperate activists for decision-makers and power centres.Johann Rupert may come to regret the flattery he heaped on Lamola at the ill-fated Capitol Hill showdown of 2025. He was talking about Lamola’s maturation from being one of Julius Malema’s defenders during the latter’s suspension and ultimate dismissal from the African National Congress (ANC). During that episode, Lamola, ambitiously legal, tried to reduce the charges levelled by the ANC’s disciplinary committee – led by the omnishambles Derek Hanekom – by claiming that Malema’s lobbying for a Botswana coup was just gossip: “On a balance of probability,” he remarked, “it wouldn’t happen.”Lamola is dragging the country into the same levels of diplomatic extremism Rupert believed he had grown out of. He’s speaking to deranged reparations lobbyists. He’s talking in forums attended by explicit antisemites and individuals who suggest ending the white race. He is sitting in the one room that still has semi-reliable electricity in that sorry state of an embassy, opposite an ambassador appointed to fail.If DIRCO were hoping it would take a decade and a confession from an intelligence operative to leak its role in circulating the “white genocide” myth, then that time is being shortened by Lamola’s behaviour. Nobody looks upon the sprinting, defiance, and bad judgement and thinks: these are good actors. Nobody outside parasitic legacy media believes that the ANC is being strong-armed or bullied, or is encouraging them to resist on principle. The burden of too many secrets is now too much for a department increasingly inept at covering its tracks to shoulder.CalculationAmerica’s calculation that only an ethnic polarisation strategy would inch the country closer to a long-awaited reckoning on failed domestic policies is something nobody wanted. Yet one of its methods is emerging as additional humiliation: in the face of intensified scrutiny, South Africa sought no continental allies against what it could have framed as contemporary imperialism. It did not beg the European Union to fight in its corner. The week sanctions were announced, the ANC raced to some of the most radical forces inside America. It would surprise nobody if one of DIRCO’s next stops was Portland, Oregon, where Antifa was afforded the privilege of listening to its Director General Zane Dangor mumble.It is not everyday prestige media confesses its illogical reasoning, but last week News24’s editors convalesced on the “redress-created-a-new-elite” perspective. While some of its journalists have gone after ANC-aligned gorgers and won deserved praise, it has never questioned the grotesque apparatus within which the gorging is occasioned. Sadly, any language indicating adjustment to the solidarity was nixed by the suggestion that it is up to the country to determine the American investment conditions. That is the Ramaphosa-ANC way: claims, promises, deference, and dithering.And what to make of Lamola’s appearance at The Riverside Church, at an event featuring the Brand South Africa logo on the invitation, on the eve of the United Nations General Assembly? There are a few things here worth considering.Collective SpiritThe collective spirit of those attending, including the Palestine activists Nadya Tannous and Mahmoud Khalil, alongside the disgraced charity Oxfam’s former head Winnie Byanyima, is explicitly anti-American. With the exception of its agitated students, academics, demented propagandists like Redi Tlhabi, and fringe party leaders, this is not a position supported by the majority of South Africa. Lamola was eager to quote Martin Luther King in a church famous for being sponsored by Rockerfeller money, most likely unaware that MLK had also once said a few things about skin complexion and judgement.In the background something else is happening. Last month Compact magazine published a longform account of American race relations by the respected author Helen Andrews. Referencing the asymmetrical progress of MLK and the civil rights movement, Andrews illustrated the creep toward the societal conditions that reflect in contemporary Britain, where state departments now openly recruit on race or where the judge’s handbook incorporates modern “anti-racist” theory. But unlike Britain, the trend is making enemies in America across political lines, because it is hard to consider anything more antithetical to that country’s dream.It is tempting to blame Lamola for poor choices, but he is merely the latest avatar of a soiled history, artificially – temporarily – buoyed by fashion. But the brass tacks of diplomacy are fast and rough, as evidenced by the encounter between the British Prime Minister Andy Burnham and US President Donald Trump earlier this week..Read more:.FT: Lamola blames US for “stuck” trade talks, says it is politicising process.Since his election, social justice quarters in London have been aggressively lobbying Burnham to finally knot the Americans into the agreement of the Chagos island giveaway. But Trump’s reception lasted barely a few icy seconds: it is just not going to happen.So you can side with extremists. You can twist the truth through your various client journalism channels available, make it sound like you are on top of your game. But if you are a department run exclusively by a party that has buried many bodies – too many to remember where they lie – you are going to get found out sooner or later..This article was first published by The Common Sense and is republished with permission..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

SLR: Lamola's Washington strategy could push South Africa further out in the cold

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