Anger over red list is warranted, but misdirected
Kenya is off the list because it set itself a coherent goal and put its back into it. We did not
We are enraged at the UK leaving us languishing on its Covid “red list” last week while removing Kenya, Pakistan and Turkey. We approach yet another disastrous summer. The UK is our single biggest source of tourist revenue. SA being on the red list means Brits have to quarantine back home if they visit here.
But behind all of this is yet another ANC government failure. Our diplomacy has been found horribly wanting, which is probably little wonder. Our embassies have become a gift to deserving ANC comrades who need the money, and a government that survives on that patronage.
Our diplomatic corps is overrun with political appointments and it means that when the chips are down and our potentially biggest jobs sector is threatened, the likelihood of SA making a mess of its response is very high.
When the UK put us on its red list after the emergence of the Covid Beta variant here in December last year, I remember a frantic effort by then UK high commissioner Nigel Casey to get Brits onto flights home as our second wave, driven by Beta, spread. Beta hadn’t appeared there yet. Casey’s toil was probably one of the great diplomatic evacuations of the age, overtaken only recently in Kabul.
We deepened UK alarm when research on the backbone UK vaccine, AstraZeneca, by Wits vaccinologist Shabir Madhi, showed it was less than brilliant against Beta and our scientists fought in public. Glenda Gray, head of the South African Medical Research Council, who had led the Johnson & Johnson vaccine research here, taunted Madhi in public.
When the Kenyans were red-listed on April 9 they went into diplomatic overdrive. Expected to stand by while the Brits loaded their citizens onto flights back to London but would not take
Kenyans, Nairobi instead banned all flights from the UK and put arriving
Britons into quarantine, complaining, under the Vienna Convention, that they had not been consulted.
That got London’s attention.
Kenya’s high commissioner in
London is Manoah Esipisu. You will not find a more determined or focused diplomat. He is a former spokesperson for the Commonwealth secretariat and for President Uhuru
Kenyatta. He will one day become secretary-general of the
Commonwealth.
Our high commissioner in London is Oliver Tambo’s daughter,
Nomatemba. If she is anything like her mother, Adelaide, she’ll be a force to reckon with but, with the greatest respect, was never equipped to handle a crisis this big.
Team Kenya were relentless and there’s a strategic bond between the two countries anyway that we have long since pissed away on Russia and China. Kenya is inevitably part of a new alliance of powers gathering in the Indo-Pacific, most recently highlighted by a huge deal to sell US and UK nuclearpowered submarine tech to Australia to counter Chinese ambition in the South China Sea.
The Kenyan retaliation reinforced its bond with Britain. In SA, business has tried on its own to respond to the red listing, but the Kenyan government response opened up a joint emergency task force to review the listing, led by both foreign ministers. They secured agreement for Kenyan scientists to have access to UK research and for Kenya to provide updated data of its own. And they got UK help to improve Kenyan genomic sequencing.
The only goal in all of this was always to get Kenya off the red list. They developed relationships way beyond the government, with scientists, politicians and civil society, and deliberately built a narrative away from victimhood, in which we wallow. There was unremitting engagement on the subject between leadership at the top. Indeed, while the UK invited President Cyril Ramaphosa to the G7 meeting in Cornwall in June, and Naledi Pandor to the G7 foreign ministers meeting before that, Kenyatta scored an official visit of his own to London in July.
The fact is, Kenya is off the red list because it set itself a coherent and clear goal and put its back, as a government, into it. We did not. The UK updates its travel regulations every three weeks. Maybe we’ll get lucky next time. Pandor, we’re assured, called her UK counterpart before the announcement and has again since. That may count as actual toil at the department of international relations & co-operation, but it doesn’t knock over the coconuts.
No doubt Ramaphosa will be thinking about calling Boris Johnson himself now. Our story is solid. The Beta variant is gone, but who are we telling that to? Who have we built a relationship with? We threw away a million AstraZeneca vaccines. Within two weeks of Kenyatta sitting down with Johnson, 800,000 vaccines were delivered directly to Kenya.
If we lose another tourist summer we have no-one to blame but ourselves. No-one owes us a living.