To Russia with Love and Hopeless Devotion, from Fikile Mbalula and the ANC

This past weekend, ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula posted on X: “From Russia the meeting of minds the new world order in motion.”

Mbalula was posting from the first “international inter-party forum against modern neo-colonialist practices”, headlined “For Freedom of Nations”, organised by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, and attended by about 400 delegates from more than 50 countries.

Mbalula happened to be in Moscow when Putin’s government announced that its arch-critic Alexei Navalny had died in prison on Friday, 16 February.

In the eyes of many Western governments – and certainly internal opponents – the Kremlin is the prime suspect in Navalny’s death, having tried to poison him nearly four years ago.

But Mbalula said not a word about Navalny’s suspicious death – not even to call for an investigation.

On the contrary, he vowed that the ANC would remain loyal to Russia, no matter the cost.

“We, South Africa, stand with Russia as our friend and we make no apologies for that... We will never abandon you,” Mbalula said at the forum, as reported by RIA Novosti.

He said South Africa was ready to sacrifice its relationships with other friends for the sake of its friendship with Russia.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Russia’s lost Alexei Navalny’s drive for sanity but his spirit lives on

This vow of absolute devotion to Russia has understandably gone down like a lead balloon with Western ambassadors in Pretoria, particularly of countries which provided substantial support to the ANC when it was in exile, fighting apartheid.

Mbalula, of course, quite often embarrasses even his own party.

Yet his visit to Moscow for this event clearly had the blessing of the party.

When Daily Maverick asked party leader President Cyril Ramaphosa about it last week, he did not distance himself from Mbalula’s visit, though his reply was vague.

“These are developing issues where we seek to bring everyone into one tent, so relax,” he said. “The world is topsy-turvy as it is now. There are so many moves and changes all over the world.” 

Putin’s United Russia Party

It does indeed seem topsy-turvy that the ANC – a party which still likes to think of itself as socialist – goes out of its way to fraternise with Putin’s United Russia Party which seems, if anything, to be rather fascist.

It appears that the ANC therefore is simply suffering from a mindless nostalgia for Russia’s previous incarnation, the Soviet Union, which supported the ANC as they were then ideologically aligned. 

Now, 34 years later, Putin and his United Russia represent the kind of lawless, oligarch-dominated economics that must be making Karl Marx turn in his grave.

Socially, too, the party has now formally adopted the policy of “Russian conservatism” which is most strongly shaped by the Russian Orthodox Church. 

This includes strong opposition to abortion and homosexuality, especially, and any attempt to put individual rights above those of family, community or nation.

“The Russian Orthodox Church helps project Russia as the natural ally of all those who pine for a more secure, illiberal world free from the tradition-crushing rush of globalisation, multiculturalism and women’s and gay rights,” as Wikipedia puts it.

The Putin government and the ruling party also lend support to right-wing political parties in Europe – such as Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France and Alternative for Germany in Germany. 

And in the United States, it has largely been the pro-Trump right wing of the already right-wing Republican Party that has opposed US support to Ukraine to fight Russia.

Many contradictions

Russian expert Irina Filatova, professor emeritus and senior research associate of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, says objectively there could be many contradictions in the ANC fraternising with the URP.  

But it is enough for the ANC that it shares with United Russia an 'anti-Western, anti-colonial' agenda. When either party hears phrases like “anti-colonialism” or “ neo-colonialism”, it reacts like Pavlov’s dog.

“They think of the world in Soviet categories. There are exploiting nations and there are exploited nations and that narrative suits them absolutely. That’s their mentality, that’s their ideology. 

“What’s behind it either economically or whatever, they are really not interested. So I don’t see any contradictions in that.”

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-02-22-when-the-ancs-closest-allies-killed-their-own-mandela-in-navalny-and-we-looked-away/

Filatova adds that the former Fox anchor Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Putin had revealed several objective contradictions – for instance, Putin’s territorial claims on Ukraine based on 9th-century or 17th-century history. And his claim that Ukraine was an artificial state because it was created by Stalin and Lenin in 1919.

If this was true, then most African states were also artificial as most had been also created after 1919 by colonial powers, she said.

“But the South Africans do not see this contradiction. They just follow the Russian line and that’s all.”

Putin blaming Poland for the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 in the Carlson interview was “like blaming Jews for the Hamas invasion” of Israel on 7 October last year.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Vladimir Putin justified Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland; South Africa must denounce him

She noted too that in the Carlson interview, Putin had claimed at least parts of Polish territory because Russia had conquered Poland in bits and pieces during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The ANC  should reject this as it should not, according to its own principles, be recognising Putin’s claims on the territories of other countries, she said.  

“But you see, the ANC doesn’t know these things. They are not interested in these things. They don’t know their own history. And they don’t know their own principles. They are stuck in colonial times. This is just a propaganda exercise.”

Power alliances

Most analysts say that United Russia is not really a party in the usual sense of having an independent ideology or even an independent existence.

“It is basically the party of power,” as Olexiy Haran puts it.

“These are people who were united around Putin and they didn’t have any freedom of discussion within this party,” said Haran, professor of comparative politics at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and research director at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a leading Ukrainian analytical and sociological think tank.

“These people are not ideological. They are more interested in staying in power and keeping their business. So if there were any signs of problems with the Putin regime, they might easily switch sides or downplay their role in supporting Putin.

“This is the harsh reality of a fascist-type regime.”

Samuel Ramani, a tutor in politics and international relations at Oxford University and author of the recent book Russia in Africa, agrees that “the United Russia party is mostly a catch-all party that serves Putin’s ambitions. 

“Since the 2012 elections and the protests that accompanied them, United Russia has embraced a more conservative policy agenda to appeal to the Orthodox Church and nationalists. But it is malleable in its international outreaches.” 

He says United Russia’s strategy of forming party-to-party relationships with African countries and parties in the Global South, mirrors the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to export its governance model to countries like Ethiopia.

United Russia builds on the legacy of inter-parliamentary dialogues that helped Russia rebuild partnerships in Africa during the late 1990s/early 2000s, he says.

“Anti-Westernism and multipolarity are much stronger outreach tools for United Russia than conservatism in Africa and dominate the party’s outreaches to countries like South Africa.

“This is why I suspect the ANC will be engaging with them directly and why left-wing activists like Julius Malema have no qualms about being very supportive of Russia’s political system.”

Read more in Daily Maverick: When the ANC’s closest allies killed their own Mandela in Navalny and we looked away

The opinion that United Russia is not driven by ideology seems to be corroborated by the fact that Putin and his party have established links not only with right-wing parties but also with left-wing parties around the world.

So, on the right, the party has signed cooperation agreements with the populist Freedom Party of Austria and Italy’s populist Five Star Movement, among others. 

On the left, apart from the agreement it signed with the ANC back in 2012, the party has also signed agreements with parties such as the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, the Communist Party of Vietnam, the New Azerbaijan Party, the Prosperous Armenia party, the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party – Syria Region, the Workers’ Party of Korea, the Communist Party of Cuba, and others. 

Using each other

Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, also found, in her study of Russia’s influence-peddling in Europe, that Moscow had forged relationships with both left and right-wing European parties.

For her report of May 2022, entitled “Fellow travellers or Trojan horses? Similarities across pro-Russian parties’ electorates in Europe”, Snegovaya studied the policies of political parties (which had won above 2% in elections between 2008 and 2017) in 15 EU member states and found that  40 of the parties openly embraced pro-Russian positions.

These pro-Russian parties, “regardless of their ideological (right or left) leanings, tend to hold significantly more Eurosceptic attitudes than supporters of mainstream parties”.

She said this Euroscepticism explained their endorsement of narratives and policies indirectly favourable to the Kremlin.

“It also sheds some light on the opportunistic rather than ideological nature of Russia’s influence operations in the European Union, which exploit opportunities presented in respective regions. In other words, these parties are the Kremlin’s fellow travellers.”

By characterising these pro-Russian parties as “fellow travellers” – rather than “Trojan horses” – Snegovaya meant that the European parties and Russia were using each other to promote their mutual anti-EU interests, rather than Moscow one-sidedly using the European parties to advance its anti-EU agenda.

Snegovaya told Daily Maverick that her paper was about Europe. “But we can safely assume the Kremlin’s approach is similar across various geographic contexts.”

To apply her thesis outside Europe, one would need to broaden the Euroscepticim she identified to embrace a wider scepticism – or indeed, often more strongly, hostility – towards the West more generally.

So it seems Mbalula and the ANC are not Putin’s or the United Russia’s “useful idiots”. They are not Russia’s Trojan Horse so much as they are fellow travellers, united by a common enemy. The difference being that the common enemy regards South Africa as a friend. 

Daily Maverick asked ANC spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri and Nomvula Mokonyane, the chair of the ANC national executive committee’s international relations sub-committee, to confirm if Mbalula had really said the things attributed to him by RIA Novosti.

Neither had replied by publication time. DM