• The Department of International Relations and Cooperation has come out in defence of its missions across the world.
• According to the department, there were minor technical challenges - most of which had been resolved.
• The department reiterated there is no crisis.
There is no crisis at South Africa's embassies abroad, and despite limited funding, the country remains an influential global player.
This according to the Department of International Relations and Cooperation which responded to recent reports of several technical and, in some instances, operational challenges at embassies in Asia.
Earlier this month, News24 reported South Africa's missions in parts of Asia have no money for overseas travel or exhibitions and visas cannot be printed because of broken printers.
But department spokesperson Clayson Monyela said the issues raised by individual missions did not apply everywhere.
He also reiterated problems with printers was the responsibility of the Department of Home Affairs which dealt with visas and other travel and identification documents.
"For example, in Singapore, one of the switches had died when this oversight [visit] took place. That was replaced the very next day. One can't then say because there was this issue raised by Singapore, what is the department doing in other missions where there's similar issues. It's wear and tear. If you use something for a long time, at some point, you need to replace it. It doesn't mean that there is a crisis," Monyela added.
He added in diplomacy, there was a sacrosanct principle called reciprocity.
"Now, South Africa is an influential global player. This year, for example, we hold the presidency of the G20. The G20 is the richest, most industrialised countries in the world. These are the big, heavy hitters.
"You can't be a G20 country like South Africa, the only African country in the G20, and be thinking about closing embassies when other countries are increasing, because when you don't have a presence in a country, it robs you of an opportunity to consolidate and strengthen political relations with that country, but also to unlock trade and investments and run campaigns to attract tourists," Monyela said.
He added: "So, there is no consideration of any more closures of any missions because if you do that, you are significantly reducing this country's influence in global affairs when you should be doing the opposite, when you should be funding embassies to run campaigns to continue to spread this country's influence."
DA MP Darren Bergman served on the National Assembly's portfolio committee during the Sixth Parliament.
Bergman had conducted several virtual oversights of South African embassies.
He said part of the problem was that South Africa paid huge amounts of money for rental.
"We should be looking at better and cheaper areas to house missions. We should look at the suburbs that are just a little further from the major city centres. Some of the missions are in a terrible state and they are not doing anything for the South African flag. It's not a great advert for tourism or the image of our country. This needs urgent attention," Bergman added.
According to him, there was an internationally accepted standard of having 80% career diplomats and 20% politicians serving as diplomats.
"We send people abroad as an appeasement or redeployment or as punishment for some of our ministers. We have cases of assault, mismanagement and a lot of time you cannot deal with it as an HR [issue], because there are politicians involved.
"Around the world, there are around 20% politicians as diplomats and 80% career diplomats. In South Africa, you would see that reversed, where there are less career diplomats and more politicians as diplomats," he said.
Committee chairperson Supra Mahumapelo said an assurance had been given the issues raised by his committee would be attended to.
"It's not the responsibility of the ambassadors and those who are representing us, so the department will attend to those particular issues," he added.
"We are the first ones to acknowledge, as the portfolio committee, the department is highly, highly underfunded. We understand the budget constraints that are ravaging the country, but we hope that in the augmentation which is going to happen now and in October in the adjustment budget, we can just improve a little bit because of those embassies," he added.
Mahumapelo stressed the embassies represented South Africa far beyond just diplomacy.
"Those offices are the face of South Africa, so we hope that some little budget can be given to the department to give attention to those particular issues," he said.
International relations expert Patrick Kadima added South Africa had signalled its intention to grow bilateral relations across the world.
"It does become extremely expensive for South Africa and several other countries in the south. But there are many countries who are represented everywhere in the world and still manage to keep their costs down. We should be centralising some of our missions to save on costs and be more efficient.
"We should look at one ambassador for more than one country. Let's put up a mission in one country serving three or four neighbours. The other option is to increase the budget, but that does not look like viable situation because of our fiscal position," he said.
Several European countries have centralised their embassies with one ambassador serving for example South Africa, Lesotho and other southern African states.
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