Is South Africa Abandoning the Polisario?

Is South Africa Abandoning the Polisario? The question was raised just few hours after the South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, delivered a speech Tuesday in Pretoria to present his program at the head of the African Union that he will be chairing for a year as of this February.

Analysts did not give a clear cut answer to the question, but said they could sense that the wind was changing.

Cyril Ramaphosa, usually a vocal supporter of the polisario front and its separatist theses, did not say a word about the Algeria-backed movement nor made the slightest hint to the Sahara issue.

Instead, he told the attending African ambassadors accredited to Pretoria and the members of his cabinet of the “special attention” he would grant to the conflicts in Libya and South Sudan, as Chairman of the pan-African organization. He said his government is already actively working to reach solutions to these two issues.

Actually, Pretoria dispatched to South Sudan on January 17 a peace mission, led by vice president David Mabuza, to mediate between the protagonists, and South Africa is member of the AU High Level Committee, chaired by the Congolese President Denis Sassou Nguesso.

The South African president also brought up the continent’s economic issues, the need to give substance to the African Free Trade Area, the necessity to integrate women in the African economic fabric…but not a word about the Polisario and its whims.

Cyril Ramaphosa’s exclusion of the Polisario from his agenda as AU Chairman will certainly anger the separatists and their Algerian mentors. However, this exclusion may also herald that the wind has shifted direction…