When the ANC’s closest allies killed their own Mandela in Navalny and we looked away

In recent years South Africa’s many compatriots, well-meaning observers and friends all over the world have been alarmed by the ANC-led government’s foreign policy turn, which is antithetical to the values on which modern South Africa was built. This departure on the Russian train, which became obvious during the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, has been accelerated over the past few months, and especially over the past few weeks, during which:

• Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, expressed support for Hitler’s reasoning for invading Poland in 1939 (and starting World War 2, which killed 80-plus million people);


• The eager and energetic participation of an ANC delegation, led by its secretary-general, at a “For Freedom of Nations” forum in Moscow; and


• The tragic news of Alexei Navalny’s death on Friday, just in time to add an extra level of threat hanging over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as he was about to address the audience at the Munich Security Conference.

https://youtu.be/iqUdjvPPPhc

Navalny’s political views in his early days were not something I could ever agree with. He made a video disparaging Muslim immigrants, supported right-wingers and even supported Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. But he moderated his nationalist leanings mid-career and admitted he had been wrong. In his manifesto from prison called “15 theses of a Russian citizen who desires the best for their country”, Navany, among other things, called for the country’s return to the internationally recognised borders of 1991.

In this process of self-transformation, he became a modern-era politician with a platform of establishing a real democracy in Russia through the fight against corruption. There was a taste of this freedom in the chaotic days of Boris Yeltsin, but it never reached a period of normality where orderly daily life and democracy existed shoulder to shoulder.

Navalny’s anti-corruption fight in a country that houses 5,889 nuclear warheads was massively effective and, as a consequence, it imprinted a big target on his back.

Emerging as a real leader of the opposition after his unsuccessful run for mayor of Moscow in 2013, Navalny’s natural leadership and unbridled energy made him an especially painful thorn in the side of Putin’s regime. No one was as fearless and no one was nearly as good a communicator as he was. His protests drew masses to the streets and his statements were followed and absorbed by Russia’s youth and intelligentsia in their tens of millions.

Navalny rattled Russia’s ruling securocrat elite. His boundless energy inspired mostly young people to expect and demand better from their government. In the process, he was attacked, brutally and repeatedly. He was twice sprayed with green dye, which injured his right eye, and on 20 August 2020 was on the receiving end of an assassination attempt with the poison novichok, which he barely survived. He was airlifted to Germany two days later, probably presumed soon-to-be-dead by the Putin regime.

And yet, he survived with the help of German doctors and released a gripping exposé of one of the Russian president’s biggest corruption scandals, Putin’s Palace — History of the World’s Largest Bribe, seen by some 129 million people. (It is great TV, too.)

A photo of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny among floral tributes outside the Russian embassy in Berlin, Germany, on 21 February 2024. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Hannibal Hanschke)

That exposé was but one of many that shook the tangled web of Russian politicians, generals and oligarchs who had bled the country dry since the demise of the USSR.

Should anyone from the ANC and its government care to learn more, they can easily find an exposé on oligarch Alisher Usmanov’s bribing of the former president and premier Dmitry Medvedev via a fishing retreat, as well as a delightfully funny exposé of another corrupt deal by the same players.

(Medvedev these days leads the United Russia party; one of his deputies is Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, who, you guessed it, was also exposed by Navalny’s investigation team. That would be the very same right-wing-friendly United Russia party that invited the ANC to its Moscow anti-colonialism conference.)

These investigations are but a fraction of a much larger body of cutting-edge investigative journalism which exposed the epic scale of corruption schemes by Russia’s political and business ruling class.

A momentous decision

Navalny knew that he was going to be arrested should he ever return to Russia from Germany, especially after the Putin palace exposé; and yet he decided to make that fateful journey back home.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Lest one day we forget: With Putin’s Russia, South Africa is committing a historic mistake

That was the moment when this extraordinary man left the realm of the normal and became a legend, a Russian counterpart to Nelson Mandela.

He did not care about his physical safety or integrity — even as he knew that he would probably be killed eventually.

But he also knew well that, with every day he spent outside of Russia as an émigré, the power of his ideas and beliefs would be further diminished. He knew firsthand the power of Putin’s propaganda machinery.

He knew that the Russian news agency Tass, virtually all of Russia’s TV stations and news sites, RT, bloggers, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s goons at the Internet Research Agency (a vicious St Petersburg-based army of trolls, numbering some 2,000 in those days) and their associates around the world (many of them in Africa) would work in unison to create a parallel world in which Putin was a hero and Navalny a CIA hack designed to ruin Russia and its people.

For his ideals of a better Russia to have a chance of not being laid waste by propaganda, he had to return home.

On 17 January 2021, he flew to Moscow where was promptly arrested and soon after sentenced to 2½ years for “parole violation” — even as he had left Russia for Germany when he was in a coma after being poisoned by Putin-controlled GRU operatives.

(The original prison sentence was from the first show trial of Navalny in 2017, which also, rather conveniently for Putin, stopped Navalny from contesting the 2018 presidential election.)

In June 2021, his Anti-Corruption Foundation was banned across 40 cities in Russia as “extremist”.

In March 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, another sentence of nine years was slapped on Navalny, for “embezzlement and contempt of court”.

In August 2023, he was sentenced to an additional 19 years for “extremism and nationalism” in a trial during which Navalny dryly remarked that he was “conducting terror attacks while sitting in prison”.

In the prisons where he was incarcerated, he was subject to sleep deprivation, psychological terror, physical abuse — and even his food was an avenue of torture.

Putin’s regime tried everything, but they could not break Navalny’s spirit. On Thursday, 15 February, during another court hearing, he even found the energy to joke with the judge.

The following day, 16 February, Navalny was declared dead.

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

The man responsible…

The world was shocked but not surprised. The question of who/what was responsible for his death has dominated many a social media debate, but it is immaterial. Even as the prison authorities refuse to release Navalny’s body to his family, raising serious questions about the cause of his death, regardless of how he died, one person is ultimately responsible — Vladimir Putin.

Even if Navalny died of “natural causes”, the 47-year-old’s body was ravaged by the poisons and torture that Russian securocrats administered over the years until the day it broke. In his court appearances from prison, Navalny appeared emaciated. He was treated badly every step of the way, and many a stronger man would have broken long before.

A person holds a sign as they attend a torchlight procession in memory of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died on 16 February in a Arctic penal colony, the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, in Capitol Square, Rome, Italy, 19 February 2024. EPA-EFE/ANGELO CARCONI

It turns out that even Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny was mortal.

However, his defiance of dictatorship, his steadfastness in the face of evil and his fearless leadership will not be forgotten.

They will only grow with time. Putin killed a man, but he could not kill his spirit or the ideals for which he lived.

It is impossible not to see the similarity between the actions of the two regimes that the ANC itself is so well acquainted with — the National Party’s apartheid regime and Putin’s modern incarnation of the brutal and aggressively expansionist Russian empire.

Opposition leaders in both regimes were targets for persecution, arrests and jailing, often paired with vicious torture and cold-blooded assassinations. Journalists were jailed and sometimes murdered for doing their job. Wars were always of choice and neighbouring countries lived in fear of invasion.

Basic humanity was denied — including families’ requests for their loved ones’ bodies so they could be buried with dignity. Even people laying flowers in city centres were arrested and detained by the thugs from the security services.

How can one not see the similarity between the fate of those thrown from the 10th floor of John Vorster Square and the spate of defenestration deaths that appear to be one of Putin’s assassins’ signature techniques?

Or not compare the apartheid government’s widespread use of poisoning with the GRU’s seemingly free-flowing novichok, inside Russia and abroad?

How can one not recognise it was the same ink used to write the repertoires of exile, detainment and brutal, long-term jail sentences, so diligently used by both the National Party and the Putin regime?

Or the fact that elections were always an exercise of a small minority deciding who would be able to campaign and participate? Democracy in which the president himself chooses who will be allowed to oppose him in the coming elections is a mockery — just type Boris Nadezhdin in your search box.

And yet. And yet.

To Russia with love

“We, South Africa, stand with Russia as our friend and we make no apologies for that... We will never abandon you,” said ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula at the ridiculously described (the first “international inter-party forum against modern neo-colonialist practices”) and named (For Freedom of Nations) forum, as reported by Russia’s RIA Novosti.

Mbalula added that South Africa was ready to sacrifice its relationships with other friends for the sake of its friendship with Russia.

Read more in Daily Maverick: To Russia with Love and Hopeless Devotion, from Fikile Mbalula and the ANC

Even as the democratic world was reeling, the people running South Africa remained silent until, eventually, Dirco Minister Naledi Pandor issued a statement on Twitter via a spokesperson about her concern over Navalny’s death and hope that the people who killed him would investigate themselves thoroughly (my interpretation of her words, which I believe accurately reflects their essence).

South Africa is still not saying anything about Putin justifying Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939.

This contradiction, this 180-degree turn by the ANC, from being a mortal enemy of apartheid to supporting Putin and his violent, aggressive regime is beyond logic and understanding.

How can the ANC-directed South Africa hitch its wagon so tightly to a regime that so fundamentally opposes the values our modern society was built on?

And if any wise commentator reverts with “welcome to realpolitik”... the real realpolitik is based on certain attainable goals: enhanced economic cooperation, a strategic defence alliance, and prevention of war. The problem is, none of the issues is a threat to South Africa, and the Russian resource-based economy is not in a shape to especially help ours at this dire moment — it has massive problems of its own and as a minor trading partner can’t offer South Africa much anyway.

South Africa’s loyalty to the Russian president defies reason.

And it is plain dangerous for our future. Putin and Co have built a citadel of violence and aggression. They are a main vector of international instability and by far the most bellicose player on the African continent. They have corrupt and often inept factotums who maintain their wealthy lifestyle by keeping their population in poverty and information darkness. They do not flinch at expending hundreds of thousands of lives of their young people in a war of Putin’s incomprehensible choice.

Believing that these people can be anyone’s friends is just plain wrong. The sooner the ANC government admits it, the better. Condemning in no uncertain terms the Putin government for killing the opposition leader would be a good place to start.

At the end of the day, how much is this deafening silence worth to the ANC?

It is safe to say that Navalny will haunt Putin until his very last moment. The dictator may have built a regime that has crushed anything that even resembled democracy and accountability in Russia, but he won’t be able to rewrite his history. And this very same history will judge him harshly, as it did Hitler and Stalin.

Similarly, the ANC government’s relationship with Putin’s regime, the bunch that just killed their own Mandela, will haunt South Africa for a long time. This will not end well for us. DM