Think third party when trying to sell SA to Washington

Not long after al-Qaeda took down the twin towers in New York and with them, collaterally, the rand, the great Peter Bruce, then editor of this newspaper, informed me that he could no longer afford a correspondent in Washington — so I went to work for Thabo Mbeki.

The 2002 World Economic Forum was held in New York rather than Davos as a post-9/11 gesture of solidarity. There, I bumped into presidential spokesman Bheki Khumalo, whom I first met covering an Mbeki visit to Havana. Khumalo — who unlike Mbeki’s foreign minister, the former wife of Jacob Zuma, was splendidly unimpressed by Cuban communism — asked if I would like to do some writing for the chief. With encouragement from Tony Heard, who had been my editor at the Cape Times and was now in the presidency, I sent a proposal to Joel Netshitenzhe, head of the Government Communication and Information System. That led to a contract with the aboutto-be-launched International Marketing Council (IMC), later renamed Brand SA.

To anyone familiar with my opinion pieces in Business Day and the Sunday Times, my career move must have looked pretty weird. Though I had come to admire Mbeki himself and come to believe many of his views were misrepresented (on Aids I turned out to be horribly wrong), being then of a Thatcherite bent, I had never been particularly kind to the ANC in my scribblings.

That, I assume, was part of the reason I was hired.

The people in the presidency to whom I and my IMC counterpart in London, John Battersby, reported — principally Netshitenzhe and Essop Pahad — seemed to like the idea of having someone with the connections of a veteran hack and reputation on the right for bloody-minded truth-telling to explain what Mbeki was really all about.

What inspired me to share this bit of personal history was Tony Leon’s column last week quoting a Washington “insider” on how SA’s Washington embassy has been missing in action as the expropriation without compensation brouhaha has hotted up (Trump has exposed our sleeping diplomats, August 29). I have had few dealings with the mission since parting company with Brand SA at the end of 2014. However, in all fairness to ambassador Mninwa Mahlangu and his team, this is not the easiest of times to be representing any country here — let alone one as beset as SA, given what’s in the White House.

Would the NetshitenzhePahad approach be costeffective now?

The question is moot. At the present exchange rate, my Brand SA successor, a proud ANC cadre, is into the taxpayer’s wallet for R5m a year in salary and living allowance alone, according to the contract on file with the US justice department.

The challenge is to convince global decision makers and those who influence them to see through the boisterous political kabuki of expropriation without compensation and have faith that, as dire as things look now, the centre will hold under Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership.

That will require facts, independently validated and explained by credible interlocutors and third-party endorsers not on the government’s inflated payroll — in other words by business.

More than ever, SA needs a new corporate-sponsored SA Foundation with plausible representatives in important capitals to explain and advocate for the country from a privatesector perspective. The old SA Foundation is tainted in political memory by its having lobbied against sanctions, so pick a different name. But don’t dismiss the concept.

SA’s first postapartheid ambassador to the US, Franklin Sonn, certainly didn’t. He pleaded with the foundation not to close its Washington office after 1994.