ANALYSIS: Dlamini would likely continue Zuma’s foreign policy

Pretoria, South Africa| BY PETER FABRICIUS| ISS TODAY| Later this month South Africa’s ruling party begins its five-yearly policy conference to determine the direction to be taken by the new African National Congress (ANC) president who will be elected in December. This is assuming that that person also becomes South Africa’s president after the 2019 national elections.

This week Edna Molewa, chair of the ANC’s sub-committee on international relations (and national environment minister), presented the party’s draft international relations document to be discussed at the policy conference.

The document will then be adopted at the national elective conference in December.

The document is founded on the overarching principle of ‘progressive internationalism’. This is defined as ‘a radical perspective of international relations that the liberation movement developed out of the struggle for liberation … it entails opposition to the perpetuation of the legacy of global imperialism manifest in the global power asymmetry, the dominance of the global North over the South and the world, structural global inequality and poverty’.

Etcetera. You can feel the nostalgia. As three notable foreign policy analysts wrote this week in a provocative response to the policy paper, the ANC’s ‘perspectives on power dynamics in the world have travelled back in time, and are frozen in a world that no longer exists’.

FULL ANALYSIS HERE (click)

As president, Dlamini Zuma would likely continue Jacob Zuma’s foreign policy trajectory. @PFabric ISS Today https://t.co/P8BJlN7Yq3 pic.twitter.com/2iTQRKM7Ql

— ISS (@issafrica) June 15, 2017