It may well be that President Cyril Ramaphosa is rattled, and not just by the Lady R and the cost of South Africa's ill-judged diplomacy towards the conflict and its relations with the US, which is why he seized on a pre-existing Brazzaville Foundation initiative to launch 'his' peace mission.

One of the persistent foreign policy themes of the post-Cold War years is in the notion that countries should position themselves to "punch above their weight", a term coined by the then British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd.

Post-apartheid South Africa was, in its early days, seen to punch above its weight, by dint of its transition from apartheid and its relative economic sophistication in Africa. Even though its economy was small (today ranking just 39th out of 216 countries and territories in GDP terms, in the company of Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Denmark and Egypt, and more revealingly just 96th in GDP per capita), and its armed forces were politically compromised, the authority of its moral position gained it a place at the top diplomatic table.

There was a personal dimension to this, just as President Volodymyr Zelensky and his team have managed with Ukraine. This step up in weight divisions, to use a further boxing analogy, reflected the stature of Nelson Mandela, and the reconciliation he personified.

Now that transition is fraying, South Africa's moral authority has been undermined by continuous cavorting with dictators and totalitarians and a looney-left UN voting record. The miracle of the end of apartheid has...