Three months ago Sathyandranath Mac Maharaj, known to his friends as Mac, returned from Belfast to his native South Africa, having failed to find a breakthrough in the impasse over IRA weapons.

Not long after landing in Johannesburg, he met Cyril Ramaphosa, his comrade in the African National Congress who was an old hand in the Byzantine world of Ulster politics.

Mac Maharaj, a confidant of Nelson Mandela and one of the last ANC fighters to lay down his arms, had gone to Belfast with the man who, in the old order in South Africa, had been his white counterpart: Leon Wessels, a cabinet minister who ran the security apparatus in the apartheid regime.

Maharaj and Wessels tried to persuade the politicians in Belfast that they were throwing away a golden opportunity, but had as much success as Peter Mandelson and Brian Cowen, not to mention Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, which is to say, none. The power-sharing government, just 72 days old, was suspended before it could collapse.

Newspapers the world over said the peace process was on the brink of collapse. But as those headlines blared around the world, Mac Maharaj had a different take sitting with his old friend in Jo'burg.

"This is soluble," Mac Maharaj told Cyril Ramaphosa.

Such optimism should come as no surprise. The South Africans have always had more faith in the politicians in Belfast than those politicians had in themselves. For 30 years the politicians and, to a lesser extent, the people of Northern Ireland, have insisted their conflict cannot be compared to others. In South Africa many people, especially black people, smile and nod, too polite to say the obvious.

For much of the last decade, South Africans have taken a keen interest in Northern Ireland. It is an interest that can be traced to a conference at the University of Massachusetts in Boston in 1992 which, for the first time, brought together the leading political players in Northern Ireland and South Africa.

That conference, and follow-up gatherings in Boston in 1995, Belfast in 1996 and South Africa in 1997, were organised by Padraig O'Malley, the Dublin-born senior fellow at the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs at the university.

"The South Africans had much to teach the people in Northern Ireland," says O'Malley. "The challenge was to teach them in a way that was inspiring rather than threatening." The bottom line, he adds, was that if the South Africans could somehow find a relatively peaceful way out of the morass that was apartheid, there was no reason why the people in Northern Ireland could not reach a similar accommodation.

While some might say the comparison is apples and oranges - green apples, if you must - there were some important connections. First, the IRA looked up to and admired the ANC, seeing the ANC's struggle for self-determination as similar to their armed struggle. The common wisdom was that unionists could relate to Afrikaners, who shared with them a siege mentality and the sense that the whole world was biased toward the other side.

But as Roelf Meyer, who was Ramaphosa's counterpart as chief negotiator for the National Party, told me a few years ago, and reiterated as recently as last November after his most recent trip to Belfast, his experience was as relevant to the republicans as it was to the unionists. "People are people," Meyer said. "There is little difference."

Tell that to the Sinn Fein activists at Connolly House in Andersonstown, or the Ulster Unionists in their party headquarters in Glengall Street. And yet, against the odds, something tangible has come from the South African connection.

Over the next two weeks, unionists who distrust the IRA and oppose the Belfast Agreement will no doubt suggest that the ANC is overly sympathetic to the IRA and to the republican movement. They will probably claim Cyril Ramaphosa is so ideologically in tune with republicans that he is incapable of being an impartial arms inspector.

But as someone who has charted the South African connection for almost a decade, I can vouch for many of the players, whom I have interviewed on and off the record. Most striking is their stated dedication to make things better for the people of Northern Ireland, not some of the people, but all.

The South Africans have seen, and in some cases inflicted, things worse than anything that has occurred in Northern Ireland, worse than Omagh, worse than the Shankill Road bomb, worse than the Dublin and Monaghan bombs.

They know what an eye for an eye means, and where that mentality can lead. That said, the South Africans, white and black, are a warm people, the kind one meets in a pub in Cushendun, or in east Belfast on a sunny Sunday afternoon, or walking the dog in Enniskillen at dusk.

But if you think you can bullshit the South Africans, you've got another think coming. In 1997, when Ramaphosa and Meyer hosted the Northern Ireland parties at a conference in South Africa, one Northern politician showed up 15 minutes late for a seminar taught by Ramaphosa.

The politician offered some lame excuse and a sheepish smile, but Ramaphosa would have none of it. "Every minute here is costing me a million pounds," replied Ramaphosa. "I don't have time to spare. When I say 7.30, I mean 7.30."

The politician slumped noticeably in embarrassment.

At one point during that conference, Nelson Mandela ambled in, showing his physical deterioration. He wore a loud shirt and a determined face. Mentally, however, the old man was as sharp as a tack.

He laid into the unionists, telling them you don't make peace with your friends, but with your enemies. He gave no quarter to the republicans, telling them the IRA had to restore its ceasefire immediately or any talk of a better future was moot. He also told the republicans that they could not retain a private army if democracy was to take root in Northern Ireland.

When, a couple of years ago, I asked Martin McGuinness what that session was like, he smiled and said: "When Nelson Mandela says something, you listen."

And so it appears the republicans have. The South Africans in general, the ANC in particular, and Cyril Ramaphosa in person have told the IRA that while their opposition to turning in weapons is perfectly understandable, it is, in political reality, not enough.

David Trimble needed more to convince his party, if not himself, that the IRA was sincere, that it was truly committed to letting Sinn Fein seek a united Ireland through strictly democratic politics.

The message from Ramaphosa and Maharaj to the IRA was sympathetic but also blunt: we know you can't say the war is over at this point, but let the unionists know the war is over.

Maharaj met IRA leaders, including Brian Keenan, the Belfast IRA commander, as recently as February. The IRA leaders complained that their offer eventually to put their weapons "beyond use" had been arrogantly thrown back in their face by the British, specifically by Mandelson, whom the IRA accused of siding with the unionists by suspending the power-sharing government.

As they pleaded their case, the IRA leaders saw in Mac Maharaj someone who once shared their ambivalence about shutting down a paramilitary organisation and entrusting its interests to democratic politics. Maharaj served time with Mandela in the Robben Island prison where Mandela spent 30 years and the men are extremely close.

But even while Mandela and the ANC were in their initial negotiations with the white National Party, Maharaj continued to mount attacks against the South African security forces. After Mandela convinced Maharaj that continuing the violence only put off reconciliation with the white community, Maharaj came in from the cold and took the transportation minister's portfolio in Mandela's cabinet. In that position, he got to know, and like, the then British trade minister, one Peter Mandelson.

Mac Maharaj, the one-time communist who is now a bank director, the last major ANC figure to lay down his arms, had one piece of advice for the IRA leaders who were furious with his friend, Peter Mandelson.

"Be creative," he told them.

Saturday's statement, under the tutelage of the ANC, was as close as the IRA can come to saying the war is over. They will not surrender. They will not be humiliated. And they take some comfort in knowing that the ANC is standing in the wings, nodding approvingly.

It is true the ANC sees the IRA as something akin to it. But it would be wrong to overstate that symbiosis. And it would be unfair to look at Cyril Ramaphosa as a biased observer.

In post-conflict South Africa, he has as much in common with George Quigley, the Ulster Bank leader and tireless advocate for a more equitable Northern Ireland, as he does with Gerry Adams.

Let's not kid ourselves: over the years I've heard ANC figures refer to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness as "brothers". These are men who have shared the same kind of revolutionary politics and, in some cases, prison cells.

But I have also heard ANC figures, from Cyril Ramaphosa to Mac Maharaj, praise David Trimble's courage, commend Reg Empey's pragmatism, and approvingly call the Ulster Unionists the National Party of Ireland.

More than one ANC leader has compared Mr Trimble to F.W. de Klerk. And as Mr Mandela's relationship with Mr de Klerk proved, you don't have to like someone to respect them and do business with them for the greater good of all.

Kevin Cullen is London bureau chief and European correspondent of the Boston Globe. In 1997-1998 he was the paper's Dublin bureau chief