The real debate isn’t about Bozell
· Citizen
It was pretty much on the cards from the get-go. The ANC has been smarting terribly over President Donald Trump’s open disdain for race-driven policies that discourage American investment and for South Africa’s anti-Western stance.
So, last week’s demarche to US ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III was almost inevitable. It’s the discharge of 16 months of bruised pride and partisan resentment. Barely weeks into his tenure, Bozell was hauled into Pretoria’s foreign department for the diplomatic reprimand.
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International Affairs and Cooperation Minister Ronald Lamola said the government took “a dim view” of Bozell’s remarks and would “act appropriately” if his conduct did not improve. The friction transcends the ambassador’s relatively innocuous remarks at a conference.
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Bozell said nothing fundamentally outlandish or provocative. He merely set out, officially and in public for the first time, the four-item list of complaints that Washington had lodged with Pretoria almost a year earlier, to which he said the US was still awaiting a response. In fact, his speech was full of optimism about the scope for a renewed SA-US partnership.
The misstep came in the Q&A, when Bozell said he did not care what the Constitutional Court had ruled about Kill the Boer not being hate speech. It was an ill-judged formulation, and he hurriedly walked it back afterwards on X, stressing that while his personal view remained unchanged, the US respected the independence and rulings of South Africa’s judiciary.
In the Daily Friend, Institute of Race Relations CEO John Endres writes that Bozell is not here “to please all of the people, all of the time”. He is here “to make a point and, if the conditions are right, a deal”.
This goes to the heart of the South African failure. A handful of liberal think-tanks and Afrikaner pressure groups have long argued that the US, far from being merely punitive or intransigent, remains eager to engage. Yet opposition politicians, most conspicuously the DA, have shown little appetite for grappling with Washington’s “asks”.
Instead, the official version of reality, endlessly recycled, is that SA’s sovereignty is under threat. The US asks are not in the slightest revolutionary: recalibrate black empowerment rules so that American companies are not forced to surrender 30% equity; tighten the Expropriation Act to make clear that land reform will proceed on fair-market compensation terms; condemn the Kill the Boer, kill the farmer chant; and treat farm attacks as a priority crime.
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What is lacking is not public consent, but political will. Yet Presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said the ambassador sounded as though he were talking to “a colony or a subsidiary of the US government”, while ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula declared that South Africa would not be “dictated to”.
So, why the fury and vitriol, so wildly out of proportion to the modest concessions needed to meet Washington’s formal asks?
A largely veiled struggle is underway within the ANC, the military and the foreign department over this country’s place in the world.
Meanwhile, the opposition parties that keep the unity government afloat, the corporate sector that keeps the economy turning and the media that are supposed to guard our constitutional democracy, have all allowed themselves to be pointedly excluded from the argument.
Bozell’s unenviable task is to impress upon the South African establishment that the US can tolerate a foreign policy that is genuinely what the ANC claims it to be: principled non-alignment.
What it will not tolerate indefinitely is a diplomatic posture that remains provocatively hostile to the US and its allies, while pretending to be even-handed. Such a stance will carry costs. What those costs are likely to be and whether South Africans are willing to pay them is the public debate that ought to be occupying the country.
Instead, we are invited to rage at the messenger.
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