According to the Bible, God created heaven and earth in six days.
Defence Minister Angie Motshekga was given an entire week to produce a plausible rationale for Iran’s participation in a naval exercise in South African waters, in defiance of the military’s Commander-in-Chief, President Cyril Ramaphosa.
She laboured mightily and, so far, has produced diddly-squat. By Friday’s deadline, there was still no report.
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Where is the explanation, Angie?
A week after the exercise ended the Iranian ships were still, provocatively, offshore.
To be fair to Motshekga, compared to God, she may have the harder brief.
How, without heads rolling at the top of government, does one offer a credible account of Iran’s continued presence once it belatedly dawned on Ramaphosa how grotesque the optics of Iranian warships cheek-to-jowl with the SAS Amatola, while Tehran crushed dissent at home and Washington debated whether South Africa still deserved the tariff privileges of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act?
Her board of inquiry — no information is available as to its composition — has a relatively simple task. It must determine whether Ramaphosa’s instructions on Iran’s participation in the Will for Peace 2026 (WFP), supposedly “clearly communicated to all parties concerned”, were nevertheless “misrepresented and/or ignored”.
That, of course, does not mean the department of defence won’t still conjure up a fantastical explanation that protects the president’s reputation, lets the defence minister and the military high command off the hook, and avoids blaming the Iranians.
The problem is that no one who matters will believe any finding that does not, in one way or the other, reconcile the contesting scenarios: a president who procrastinates; a South African National Defence Force (Sandf) leadership emboldened by his weaknesses to usurp for itself a political role; and an Iran that can rely on Pretoria’s backing, irrespective of the costs to SA.
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Broken telephone game or protecting the president?
One should take as given that the board’s primary purpose is not to find the truth, but to protect the reputation of the president by absolving him from blame for an incident that has taken SA’s relationship with the US to a new low.
Indeed, the tenor of much of the media reporting, has been to craft a narrative that, while acknowledging something went badly wrong, tries to stop the political blast radius from reaching the president.
These reports rely heavily on anonymous sources and imaginative pro-Ramaphosa extrapolations, while downplaying evidence of an out-of-control SANDF.
The preferred line is that Ramaphosa did issue a clear and timely order that Iran should not continue participating in WFP.
This, it is said, followed consultations with Iran, with China (which organised the war games) and with the other participants, Russia and the United Arab Emirates.
The withdrawal instruction, either through a broken communication process or a lone insubordinate, makes it possible for blame to fall a narrow slice of the chain of command, never to Ramaphosa’s leadership failings.
The report, when it emerges, will dress up the deeply damaging process as best it is able, by muddying the waters so that the chain of responsibility is obscured.
But in the end, either the Presidency is dealing with a defence minister and SANDF high command that are incompetent, or the Presidency managed Iran’s presence as craftily as it could to placate the US while reassuring its revolutionary ally of SA’s loyalty.
In either case, responsibility — and accountability — lies with Ramaphosa.
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