By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Criticism has trailed the planned joint naval exercises between South Africa, China and Russia. At the “multilateral maritime exercise” taking place 17 to 27 February, Pretoria will be hosting Chinese and Russian ships.
This however, has not gone down well with the opposition party in South Africa, Democratic Alliance,including the US and EU.
The exercise codenamed “Mosi”, (“Smoke” in Swahili) coincides with the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and will hold around the Durban and Richards Bay areas of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, according to a statement.
In a release at the weekend, South Africa’s main opposition party, Democratic Alliance, accused the President, Cyril Ramaphosa and the authorities of “chosen sides” with the decision to host the exercise, even though, Pretoria has said it is neutral with the ongoing war in Ukraine.
“While our government has claimed to be neutral, this is just another of many incidents where the [ruling party] ANC has clearly exposed their favoritism towards Russia and has in fact done nothing but to showcase and prove [the] government’s lack of neutrality in this case,” according to the party’s shadow minister of defence and military affairs, Kobus Marais.
He called the war games “nothing more than an expensive publicity stunt.”
Meanwhile, David Feldman, a spokesperson for the US Embassy in South Africa, was quoted by CBS News as saying that the US is “concerned about South Africa’s plan to hold joint naval exercises with Russia and the [People’s Republic of China] in February, even as Moscow continues its brutal and unlawful war of aggression against Ukraine.”
South African Foreign Minister, Naledi Pandor, who met with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov when he visited Pretoria earlier in January, said that the drills were to be “merely an exercise with friends.”
