SA must stand on own two feet

HOW stupid can people actually be? I mean, have you seen the video of the two guys walking a lion and it turns on one of them and he runs away. Like the lion wasn’t going to chase the idiot.

Perhaps there’s more information out about it now, but in what I’ve seen the guy makes it to a fence or a gate, whereupon the lion catches up and drags him back to where he was when he started running.

Meanwhile, a woman is heard off-camera shouting, “Help! Help!”, leaving me, at least, wondering whether she shouted, “Don’t be an idiot!” to him in the first place.

Anyway, the guy got a bit mauled but survived. Apparently someone fired a shot into the air and the animal stopped. It was later shot dead, proof if it were ever needed that humans are fundamentally thick.

It’s a bit like Brexit, the British decision to leave the EU. How is leaving the world’s richest and most successful trading union supposed to end well? Of course it won’t. It’ll refire the old Troubles in Northern Ireland and isolate British manufacturers.

When did you last buy a car or a coffee machine or a computer or any manufactured thing that was made by a company owned by an Englishman? When I was young that’s all we had. My dad drove a Rover, my mum an Austin. Our radio-cum-gramophone was British. The records we played were British made. I grew up on Lion and Tiger comics.

Since I came back to South Africa in 1996, I have not bought a single Christmas or birthday present for family or friends that was made in the UK, and I’m a generous person. Not on pur- pose. I wear English shoes and shirts that I buy in London. They’re perfect. But I doubt my custom will save the UK economy when it is forced to jump hurdles to sell shoes and shirts in Europe.

I asked a perfectly sensible-sounding Brit the other day what he thought of Brexit. “Can’t happen soon enough,” he said. “But it’ll hurt your economy,” I countered. “Bulldog spirit,” he said, I swear.

Then we had a whisky and moved on to South Africa and Ireland, where we were at the time.

I thought of him when I opened my copy of Business Day on Wednesday. “Trump duties could cost SA 7500 jobs”, shouted the headline on the front page. US President Donald Trump, as we all know, is intent on starting a trade war because he feels and has said “trade wars are good”.

The main targets of his ire are Chinese exports to the US. But the Chinese can stand up to the US. We can’t, it seems.

The story detailed how the Department of Trade and Industry made representations to the US government to be exempted from Trump’s new duties on steel and aluminium. To no avail. About 1% of US steel imports are from South Africa (I wonder what products those would be) which represents about 5% of local production, which implies 7 500 jobs are at risk.

The Department of Trade and Industry spokesman was quoted in the story, almost bleating, that “South Africa is not a cause of any security concerns in the US nor a threat to US industry interests”.

And he’s right. But then consider what you’re dealing with here. Trump is a right-wing American nationalist. He thinks South Africa is fundamentally hostile to his country. Go read any ANC foreign policy document and you’d have to say he has a point.

In fact, the Americans have just listed South Africa among the 10 most hostile nations, in terms of voting against US propositions at the UN. We share the honour with Zimbabwe and North Korea. Russia isn’t on the list. Nor China, nor India, nor Brazil. We are the only Brics country in the top 10.

And the reason? Pure ideological conceit. Our foreign policy is out of control. Instead of taking our own positions, we take sides, and too often the wrong sides. The Americans have been counting. How is it possible we could be outside the Brics on the UN voting table the Americans have compiled?

Foreign Minister Lindiwe Sisulu has a real job on her hands. It is to restore South Africa’s reputation as a sound and thoughtful global leader and not, as happened under her predecessors, a lapdog of any cause sufficiently “anti-imperialist”. We need to grow up diplomatically and understand that we have our own national interests.

And those are not always served by being mindlessly anti-western. We need, like India, to stand on our own two feet and for the human values enshrined in our constitution, whatever the issue. The US, even under Trump, is not always wrong. China is not always right.

We need to be nonaligned in every way. Those representations the department made on steel exports to the US didn’t fall on deaf ears. They know who we are. The 7 500 citizens whose jobs are now at risk because of Trump’s bombastic trade policies can thank the ridiculously named Department of International Relations and Co-operation (Foreign Affairs!) for their approaching ordeal.

Lindiwe Sisulu has a real job on her hands to restore South Africa’s reputation as a sound and thoughtful leader