By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
President Cyril Ramaphosa will head back to South Africa immediately after Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral to deal with the load shedding crisis.
“The President will no longer be travelling to New York from London. Instead, he will head home to deal with current Stage 6 load shedding,” Presidency spokesperson Vincent Ngwenya said.
Ramaphosa held a virtual meeting on Sunday with the “relevant” government ministers and officials for information on why so many units tripped and what could be done immediately to resolve the situation.
“This was in between attending to the lying in state of Her Majesty and the King’s reception tonight. He wanted a briefing on what led to so many units tripping, taking the country back to a situation that had been managed. He further wanted to understand what could be done immediately to resolve the current state of load shedding,” Magwenya said.
He added that South Africa’s statement at the UN General Assembly would be delivered by International Relations and Cooperation Minister Naledi Pandor instead. Ramaphosa’s decision to miss the UN General Assembly is rather ironic, given that South Africa has just abstained from a resolution that would allow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to address the same session of the General Assembly by video so he could stay at home to direct his country’s defence against Russia’s invasion.
UN rules normally require world leaders to attend the high-level opening component of the annual General Assembly session in person. But because of the pressing demands of fighting off his giant neighbour’s military assault, Zelensky asked if he could deliver his address remotely.
A resolution to allow an exception to the rules so he could do so was adopted in the General Assembly on Friday by a vote of 101 in favour to seven against. Russia, Belarus (Russia’s military ally in the war against Ukraine), and political allies Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Eritrea, Nicaragua and Syria, voted against. South Africa and 18 other countries abstained.
South Africa’s decision to abstain for the fourth time on a UN General Assembly resolution concerning Russia’s war against Ukraine has raised eyebrows in the diplomatic community. Many have questioned why Pretoria apparently opposed Zelensky’s seemingly self-evident right to address the world community in a moment of crisis for his country.
It turns out that, as so often with South Africa’s voting at the United Nations, Pretoria’s ostensible reasons for abstaining came down not to the substance of the resolution but to its wording.