The Polish were racist towards Ramaphosa's delegation, fulstop.

 Let me add my two cents worth on this saga.

I find it shocking that the media including South African media are insinuating that Poland did nothing wrong, but rather incompetence by the South African government was the cause of Ramaphosa's security delegation being held up at Chopin airport.

This was the president of a country, therefore it is very likely that all people travelling on the plane would have had diplomatic passports. The plane itself is likely to have had diplomatic status meaning that everything on the plane would have been diplomatic bag.

Diplomatic bag (it is not a literal bag) refers to goods having diplomatic status. Diplomatic bag is not subject to inspection by any other country and goods inside the diplomatic bag are not inventoried for inspection.

Typically diplomatic bag is used to convey correspondence between embassies and their countries. The status is also given to the goods accompanying or belonging to a diplomatic official.

I should also make it clear that transportation of weapons by diplomatic bag is quite normal. The Americans always do it for the Marines who guard their embassies.

The only incident that I know of when diplomatic bag was violated happened when Zimbabwe opened British diplomatic bag in 2000. An entire six tonnes of it.  Read paragraph three of the BBC news report on the incident here http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/672786.stm.

Americans have got marines guarding their embassies the world over. The weapons of those marines are conveyed in diplomatic bag meaning they are never inventoried for inspection by the host country.

Besides inventorying weapons meant to protect a national leader could give away the security plan of the leader and should never be done.

So the claim of "undeclared military weapons" is absolute hogwash. If those weapons are part of diplomatic bag so what? They are not meant to be declared.

Secondly, diplomatic passports are so-called because they give special rights to their holders. One of those rights is you do not have to apply for a visa, wherever you are going.

You go to any country and if that country does not like your presence they issue a diplomatic note giving you 24, 48 or 72 hours to leave. If there were people travelling on national passports the practice is to put them back on the plane they came with, but that does not affect holders of diplomatic passports.

I am not sure what Poland means when it says there were undeclared people on the flight. Maybe they mean that the list of people on board did not correspond to the flight plan. But flight plans are a safety mechanism and have got nothing to do with diplomacy.

If Poland had prevented the delegation from leaving airport premises that would be understandable. But preventing them from even coming down the steps of the aircraft is another level of racism. Clearly, the insinuation is that the Africans were going to contaminate Polish soil and buildings with something sinister. Maybe some horror African disease.

Lastly, on the so-called photocopies, diplomatic correspondence is by means of letters between the ministries of foreign affairs. Meaning that the DIRCO in South Africa would have written letters to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland. Travellers would have been carrying copies of those letters because the originals would have been sent to the Polish ministry.

Poland may not have had the time to respond, but at every international port of entry, there are protocol officers to deal with such diplomatic matters. That means Polish protocol officers at Chopin airport would have taken the letters and verified them with their Ministry of foreign affairs if needed.

Protocol officers are there precisely to prevent incidents like this, where diplomatic travellers are inconvenienced due to misunderstandings. Nobody is explaining why the protocol mechanism did not work at Chopin airport.

Poland did not issue any diplomatic notes during this saga which means they did not find diplomatic fault with the delegation or its luggage.

Instead, reasons that apply to non-diplomatic travellers are being given by Polish officials.

By the way, several Western leaders have travelled to Ukraine via Poland and their delegations are usually more intrusive than Ramaphosa's delegation yet we have not had similar issues. The Americans and the British will not allow anyone to inspect the weaponry and security apparatus, yet both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have travelled to Ukraine without this kind of hullabaloo. Not to mention American secretaries of state who typically have a much bigger security footprint than Ramaphosa had.

There is nothing to blame South Africa for as far as I can see. When travelling with such a large delegation it is impossible to get every nitty-grit detail in perfect order. Which is why protocol mechanisms exist at ports of entry.

The Polish were just being racist. It is sad that the white-owned media in South Africa seem to be siding with their racist brethren by shifting the blame to South Africa. By doing that they can then rant about incompetent blacks in their quest for apartheid apologism.