A number of countries, including the US, China and India, have stepped up diplomatic and economic initiatives aimed at engaging Africa. As a scholarly analysis of India’s moves titled The Indian Tiger’s African Safari by Dr. J. Peter Pham on the World Defense Review website tells us, most of these initiatives may be studied under the headings of “quests for resources, business opportunities, diplomatic initiatives, and strategic partnerships.”
What most people don’t realise is that Russia too has stepped up its African initiatives substantially and now has an enormous influence on Africa – particularly southern Africa. What sets this apart from being just another country on the list, Pham notes in this report titled The Russian Bear Returns To Africa is that it has become clear since the Georgia crisis that Russia is willing to use blunt military force to achieve its political ends. I’m not implying that there is a threat of Russian military intervention in Africa right now. It’s just that the Russian attitude seems also to be polarising attitudes in countries like the US, giving rise to positions that hearken back to the 20th century’s cold war era.
The world still gets most of its gold, platinum and diamonds from southern Africa. There are global shortages in all three.
Russia has a large amount of influence in southern Africa. Russian (actually the erstwhile Soviet Union’s) influence has played a large part even in South African President Thabo Mbeki’s support for Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. This is because the Soviet Union gave the African National Congress much needed support and training, while it was struggling to overthrow the white apartheid regime. To quote Pham’s paper:
After African National Congress (ANC) deputy president Oliver Tambo visited Moscow in 1963, the Soviet Union undertook to train the leadership cadres of the ANC’s military wing, the Umkhonto we Zizwe, and the ANC itself became the first African liberation movement to establish direct ties with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, rather than through one of the Kremlin’s “solidarity committees.” After the Soweto uprising of 1976, Soviet assistance was critical to the ANC’s establishment of training camps in the “frontline” states for the youth who fled South Africa.
The legacy of ties like this, the paper notes, still influences politics in Africa. Again to quote Pham:
By the time the Soviet Union formally dissolved on Christmas Day 1991, more than 50,000 Africans had been trained in Soviet universities and military and technical institutes, including the incumbent heads of state of Angola (José Eduardo dos Santos, an engineering graduate of the Azerbaijan Oil and Chemistry Institute), Mali (Amadou Toumani Touré, who trained as a parachute commando in the Soviet Union), and South Africa (Thabo Mbeki, who received military and political training in the Soviet Union). In the heyday of Moscow’s activism in the Third World, Soviet clients like President Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea and President Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia imposed Marxist dictatorships on their countries which aped the Stalinist prototype down to the minutest details of oppression.
Apart from the Soviet era legacy, the report notes that President Vladimir Putin’s 2006 trip to Morocco and South Africa underlined Russia’s economic ties with these countries. To quote the report again:
A number of South African companies – including South African Breweries, the chemical firm Sasol, and the DeBeers Central Selling Organisation diamond marketing cartel (the EU torpedoed Alrosa’s selling of its production through the De Beers Diamond Trading Company [DTC] so what’s relevant here are De Beers’ interests in the Archangel diamond exploration venture) – have substantial investments in Russia, while Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg’s Renova Group owns a 49-percent stake in United Manganese of Kalahari (the rest of the firm is held by a business front for the ruling ANC). The joint venture was, reportedly through Putin’s intervention, granted prospecting rights in the North Cape region where some 80 percent of the world’s known commercially exploitable reserves of manganese, a metal with important industrial alloy uses including steelmaking, are located. Two years earlier, another Russian firm, Norilsk Nickel, owned billionaire partners Mikhail Prokhorov and Vladimir Potanin, had made what was to date the largest foreign direct investment by a Russian company when it acquired a 20 percent stake in Gold Fields, a South African mining corporation, for $1.16 billion cash. At the time of the purchase from Anglo-American, Norilsk was already the world’s largest producer of nickel and palladium and a leading producer of platinum, copper, and cobalt, as well as the largest gold miner in Russia.
So, given the worldwide shortages in gold, platinum and diamonds, and given that these materials seem to abound in southern Africa’s mineral deposits, an aggressive Russia’s geopolitical ambitions could in many ways impact the global diamond and jewellery industries. Russia is already pushing the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF), of which it is a prominent member, to form a pricing cartel on the lines of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). What would it do to leverage its positions in gold, platinum and diamonds? Could it enforce a form of ‘beneficiation’ by compelling the DTC to De Beers to sell any Russian sourced diamonds through Alrosa? Would it play a more active and aggressive role in the World Gold Council?
Given Russia’s willingness to use muscle, anything is possible.
