Nganje, F. (2019) · South Africa Foreign Policy Review, Africa Institute of South Africa.
This chapter argues that, since 2009, South Africa’s development cooperation programme in Africa has increasingly been underpinned by a politics of ambivalence, resulting from the contradictions and tensions inherent in living up to the responsibilities associated with its geographical and geopolitical location, amid a fluid domestic political and economic environment. In its rhetoric, Zuma’s administration did not distance itself from the Mbeki-era focus on making South Africa the pivot of Africa’s socio-economic and political renewal. As the proposal to establish a development partnership agency suggests, it even committed itself to consolidating this continental agenda. But it was also during Zuma’s presidency that South Africa’s commitment to the goal of an African Renaissance started to become questionable, amid a discourse to re-fashion foreign policy in the service of the domestic socio-economic agenda.
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