Being there, going there: Leon sums up SA policy

In Washington DC, South Africa came up with its best defence against United States President Donald Trump’s claim of white genocide aimed at farmers by saying “the whole of South Africa is a crime scene”, according to Democratic Alliance founder and former leader Tony Leon.

Few other than Leon would put it so succinctly. He made this point to interviewer, radio journalist and fellow author Mandy Wiener, at the launch of his sixth and latest book, Being There, at the Clive M Beck Auditorium on Sunday, 25 May.

As the former South African ambassador to Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay and leader of the opposition party in Parliament, Leon shared his international relations and political expertise with Wiener.

In terms of the Trump and Ramaphosa meeting, he said, “None of this matters because we don’t know if going there and subjecting yourself to that kind of treatment is going to pay off. It could pay off in two ways. First, will South Africa’s tariffs be reduced from 31% to the baseline of 10%? If that happens, you could say the humiliation was worth it to save a lot more jobs and increase revenue.

“The other thing is, will Trump arrive at the G20 in November? The G20 without the G1 president, and America is the G1 of G20, is meaningless,” Leon said.

Wiener asked about the functioning of the Government of National Unity (GNU) as John Steenhuisen, the leader of the opposition party, accompanied Ramaphosa to the Oval Office. “We have a government that’s as obsessed as its apartheid predecessor was with racial demographics and percentages,” he said. “The white population was vastly overrepresented in the South African delegation. Ramaphosa actually said, ‘Here’s my white minister of agriculture.’

“On one level, it was amusing,” he said. “On another level, the problem with the GNU is that this isn’t the first time the government has paraded abroad that we have a multiparty government and have ‘whities’ in Cabinet. However, when they come home, they ignore their partners, bypass, and sideline them except for when it really matters.”

In Parliament over the past few months, it has become clear when it really matters, he said. The African National Congress (ANC) holds only 40% of seats in the National Assembly, so without buy-in from others, especially coalition partner the Democratic Alliance (DA), it cannot pass legislation.

“The destruction of national value, economic worth, and the inflammation of racial hatred if the DA goes and the EFF [Economic Freedom Fighters] and MK [uMkhonto weSizwe] come in,” he said, is widely understood by South African Jewry. In his book, Leon references the feedback he received during the GNU negotiations. He was told by billionaires and friends, “For heaven’s sake, just please make a deal with the ANC and don’t worry too much about the terms and conditions because the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate.”

Wiener asked him about his blow-by-blow account of the GNU negotiations in his book, and the pressure he was under from capital and big business as well as within the DA. Leon compared his experience to something George W Bush’s national security advisor for Afghanistan and Iraq said to him when they were both fellows at the Institute of Politics at Harvard. “She described her job as making big decisions with real consequences with imperfect information and with too little time.” That was how he felt during the GNU negotiations.

Digging into his book, Wiener brought up a meeting Leon had with the late former Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. “It was an audience of three. Myself, my wife Michal, and my speech writer at the time, Joel Pollak,” Leon said starting his story. While Sharon spent most of the meeting giving a monologue to the audience of three, after the meeting, he asked Leon a question that piqued his interest, namely how the South African Jewish community was doing. After Leon responded “quite well”, Sharon asked how many Jews were still in South Africa. “I said about 60 000 or whatever it was then, and I then added but the way people carry on, you would assume there were 600 000 of us because Jews are said to control everything in South Africa.” Sharon backed up Leon’s remark by sharing a story from his military days in England in the 1950s, when a fellow officer thought there were millions of Jews living in England.

“This is a classic antisemitic trope,” Leon said. “The Jews are everywhere, all powerful, and control everything. It was so interesting that I had this experience several times in South Africa, and Sharon had exactly the same experience in the 1950s in the UK.”

Going back to present-day politics with the ANC’s International Court of Justice case against Israel, Wiener asked Leon’s take on it. “There’s a big difference between the government of Israel and the existence of Israel, and too often, they get merged together, especially with our political lords and masters,” he said.

Leon described how baffled he felt when Minister of Foreign Affairs Ronald Lamola expressed in an interview directly after the White House meeting last Wednesday, 21 May, his condolences for the assassination of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington DC. Whether the Trump-Ramaphosa meeting was a “correlation or causation” for the statement made, Leon noted the turnaround in attitude since 7 October, when the South African government didn’t utter a word of condolence for the Israeli victims of the Hamas terror attack.

Leon said that he had recently given advice to someone close to government on improving South Africa’s standing with the US. “Let’s start with Israel. First, you can appoint an ambassador to Israel. Second, have a call by the South African government for the release of the hostages not coupled with anything else. That would be a good start.”

Those attending the launch left with food for thought, a book in hand, and a good read ahead.