What the proposed procedure says
Zuma travelled to India last month and was photographed there at a temple with Ajay Gupta, one of the businessmen at the centre of the state capture allegations. South Africa's high commissioner to India, Anil Sooklal, was also pictured with the pair and has since been recalled; Sooklal denies wrongdoing.[1]
Foreign Affairs Minister Ronald Lamola said on Wednesday that his department had sent parliament and the president's office a recommendation for new protocols covering former heads of state on foreign trips. Under it they would have to "provide full details" of an upcoming trip so the state can make "an informed assessment of the appropriate level of support required and any associated reputational, political, diplomatic or security risks".[1]
The file the decision rests on
A judicial commission concluded in 2022 that Zuma had hired and fired ministers central to the running of the country's economy at the behest of the Gupta family. The family left South Africa in 2018, and a court in the United Arab Emirates refused an extradition request for Atul and Rajesh Gupta in 2023. Zuma, now 84, has been expelled from the African National Congress and leads the opposition uMkhonto we Sizwe.[1]
That sequence shows how the state's instruments against the people at the centre of the file ran out: a family left the country, an extradition request was refused in another jurisdiction, an arrest warrant was cancelled. What stayed under Pretoria's own control is the support and protocol it extends to former presidents. The new instrument lands exactly there, and its scope is the scope of the authority that remained.[1]
Why now, and what it does not settle
The precedent came last year. Zuma had travelled to Morocco and spoken in support of Rabat's claim over Western Sahara; South Africa condemned the visit and lodged a formal diplomatic protest with Morocco. That trip and the India trip do not sit under the same rule. In Morocco the problem was that someone travelling as a party leader voiced a position contrary to the state's foreign policy; in India the problem was whom he was seen beside. A notification duty can price the second before departure.[1]
It cannot price the first. In what capacity a former head of state speaks abroad has stood open since the Morocco trip, and the recommendation does not touch it. Whether the procedure becomes an instrument will be seen in whether parliament writes into the text what follows from a failure to notify. A procedure with no consequence written into it remains a request.[1]