Mbeki on Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

With today's expected vote on the Sander amendment to
the Department of State authorization, I thought 
that this 1998 story from South Africa's Business
Day was interesting.  


According to Business Day's Simon Barber, at an August 1998
press conference with Vice President Al Gore, (then Deputy) 
President Thabo Mbeki offered these words:

  "I was told this afternoon that I have been saying some
  nasty things about the Assistant Secretary (of State) for
  Africa, Susan Rice; that I said I don't like her, she's nasty,
  she harasses our government officials. I want to say I've
  never said it.  Indeed, I admire her somewhat. 


There are also some interesting bits about the 
African trade bill.  Jamie


http://www.bday.co.za/98/0812/comment/e2.htm


12 August 1998
Mbeki and Erwin fail to impress in US dealings

The South Africans did not put their best foot forward at
the binational commission, writes Simon Barber

AT THE close of last week's "executive session" of the
US-SA Binational Commission, Vice-President Al Gore
and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki had two pieces of news.
First, the three-year-old commission was not dead, and
secondly, the two governments have decided to negotiate
something called a "trade and investment framework
agreement", or TIFA.

On the latter, Gore did all the talking. The US has such
agreements with a number of "mature" emerging market
countries - Costa Rica, Morocco and Chile were the
examples he cited. Their purpose is to provide a
"mechanism" for resolving "routine" trade disputes, like the
US complaint that SA's approach to reducing the cost of
medicine threatens the patent rights of international drug
companies. In some cases they have laid the groundwork
for full-blown free trade pacts.

Gore said it was "premature" to say if a TIFA with SA
would evolve in the same way, but his "personal desire and
hope" was that it would. It would have been interesting to
hear Mbeki's view, but when Gore asked him if he had
anything to add, he went off on a peculiarly nonresponsive
tangent:

"I was told this afternoon that I have been saying some
nasty things about the Assistant Secretary (of State) for
Africa, Susan Rice; that I said I don't like her, she's nasty,
she harasses our government officials. I want to say I've
never said it. Indeed, I admire her somewhat. But I wanted
to say that, because I don't know quite where the story
came from, because somebody thinks it up, and then it
grows and grows, and it ends up being a crisis (in) US and
SA relations."

There has, it is true, been chatter that Mbeki was irritated
enough by the hard-charging young assistant secretary to
complain about her to Gore last year while she was still
Africa director at the White House national security council,
and that, as a result, she was given a talking-to by
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, her unofficial
godmother.

This chatter is inside stuff, but here was Mbeki denying
gossip that most of the audience, in which Rice herself was
sitting, had never heard and would quite likely never have
heard had not Mbeki raised it himself.

Even if it was his sincere wish to put the rumours to rest, this
was SA's own Machiavelli speaking, so many found it
difficult to take his words at face value or to choke back the
thought that he was chastising the assistant-secretary,
whom he admired "somewhat".

Did he really intend that his use of the modifying adverb
"somewhat" should mean what it sounded like to American
ears? Whatever Mbeki's intention - and perhaps it was just
a gentlemanly effort to say wat verby is, is verby - the
incident serves to highlight the problems of communication
between the US and SA.

Certainly, Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin left
members of the US-SA Business Council befuddled by his
remarks about the African Growth and Opportunity Bill now
before congress. The bill, in its pristine form, would
authorise the president to scrap all duties on exports from
African countries deemed, like SA, to be serious about
reforms of the kind generally advocated by the International
Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation.

Erwin's position, as he expressed it to me, was that he
would be happy to see SA excluded from the bill's benefits if
this would help the legislation get through congress. The
benefits, while important for other countries in Africa, did
not mean much to SA, he said, and in any event,
government did not much like the attached
"conditionalities".

The council, which represents the bulk of present and
pending US direct investment in SA, and many of whose
members are active supporters of the bill, found this bizarre
when Erwin put it to them in a presentation last Wednesday.
SA's inclusion in the bill as a beneficiary is not the reason
the initiative is currently stalled in congress. The hold-up is
due to an election year fight over free trade in general. The
chances of the bill becoming law will not be altered one jot
by whether SA is included or not. As for Erwin's argument
that SA exporters have little to gain from across-the-board
duty-free access to the US market, that is viewed as
curious to say the least.

Erwin's seeming illogic sows doubts, none of them
conducive to US investment in SA. Are SA policy makers
properly informed? Are they driven by an ominous ideology?
Are they letting personal feelings about the US affect their
judgment? Is it their intention to cosy up to the Europeans
and give them favoured access at the expense of US
companies? Are they trying to protect SA's conglomerates
from US competition?

There were hopes Mbeki and Erwin would lay such
questions to rest. Quirkily, they disappointed.