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Mahmood Mamdani analyses why South African diplomacy failed in Congo
SOUTH AFRICA emerging from apartheid is not the same as Congo emerging from Mobutuism.
At least two political differences are worth noting. The South African transition was a compromise between forces for and against apartheid, the Congolese transition is marked by a military victory of the anti-Mobutu forces. Whereas the South African transition was worked out mainly through an internal engagement, with foreign influence limited to an indirect role, the transition in Congo is being worked out through a much more direct regional involvement.
These differences explain why South African diplomacy failed to achieve its intended objectives over the past few weeks. South African diplomats publicly sought a transitional authority led by forces other than Laurent Kabila and the Alliance, and tried to convince Kabila to acquiesce in this. The initiative asked Alliance forces to turn from the brink of victory and sign a compromise! Was this breathtakingly naive because South African diplomats read the Zaire situation through South African lenses?
Then there was the idea that the terms of a successful transition could be worked out through the mediation of South Africa, and South Africa alone. Even if South Africa had the public blessing of the US, (as suggested by daily praise bulletins from Washington) this initiative ignored the fact that the Zairean conflict was already highly regionalised, and required a regional consensus to be successfully managed. But that regional consensus could not be presumed – and still cannot be presumed – to be in accord with a US reading of the situation.
It is not too late to learn from the lessons of the past few weeks. The first is that South African diplomacy, particularly in Africa, does not have to dovetail with the US. Congo can and should be the birthplace of a post-apartheid foreign policy, one characterised not just by realism, but also by independence and creativity.
To be sure, realism will be ensured by a single fact: that South African capital (Anglo-American, De Beers, Spoornet) has real interests in Congo, something that goes a long way towards explaining the stamina and consistency which marked the South African initiative vis–vis Congo, as opposed to, for example, the earlier fiasco in Nigeria.
But South African capital is also handicapped, both by a history of collusion with the Mobutu regime in the past, and a growing commercial rivalry with North American interests in the present. The dilemma presents the post-apartheid government in Cape Town with an opportunity to signal the beginning of a new era. What can be the main features of a policy that can turn the new Congo into the baptismal site for post-apartheid South Africa as an independent African country?
Before it can make a positive contribution to the Congolese transition, South Africa needs to beware of missionary temptations. Today, that temptation comes in the form of a US-sponsored translation of democracy into a set of institutions defined in textbook fashion. Not surprisingly, the US champions a hastily organised electoral contest in the name of democracy. To follow this recipe would be to court political disaster.
The lesson of electoral politics in Zaire since 1990 is that political competition without levelling the playing fields simply allows kleptocrats to turn their loot of the state treasury into an electoral slush fund through which to lubricate ethnic power that keeps rural voters in line; to prop up new political groupings alongside and factions inside existing urban-based organisations; and to buy off stray votes in the event of an electoral contest.
To call for an election in a situation where Mobutu and those around him can turn some of their stolen billions into an electoral slush fund, and where anti-Mobutu tendencies (in particular, the Alliance) have not had a chance to build a political organisation, is from the outset to invite the corruption of the electoral process from one side and its militarisation from the other.
It makes more sense to view democratisation not as a turnkey project but as a process, whose first stage needs to guarantee conditions for civil and political organisation, with an electoral contest following a suitably lengthy transition process.
For South African diplomacy, it makes far more sense to concentrate on the nature of that transition process than to join the US in calling for snap elections.
Rural Congo was not very different from “reserves” in apartheid South Africa: it was governed by centrally sanctioned chiefs, with the right to enforce an administratively formulated “custom” on a subject peasantry. In this arrangement, the chiefs, the “custom” and the apparatus to enforce it, were all ethnicised. To dismantle this constellation of ethnicised native authorities, whose claim to “custom’ was nothing but a halo around a regime of force, is the first prerequisite to any meaningful democracy in the new Congo.
In the meantime, South Africa needs to beware of another danger, of becoming an unwitting party to a Cold Ware-type scenario which, in the event of an unfavourable turn of events in the new Congo, may see Western forces now massed in nearby Congo (Brazzaville) entering Kinshasa under the ruse of protecting Western lives. That would be to roll back the wheels of history and to return Africa to the era of the Cold War.
Post-Cold War US, going through the agony of Somalia and Liberia and Rwanda, often decried the absence of an African initiative. And yet, the US can be seen shrugging at the first possibility of an independent African initiative.
But this is not quite the Cold War era. It is unlikely that Western powers, particularly the US, will easily introduce ground forces into Kinshasa without political backing from South Africa. Most African governments are too dependent on Western money to balance their recurrent deficits to be able to more than whisper their opposition to such a possibility.
Understandably, and for that same reason, many wonder whether South Africa will function as the conscience of Africa on the eve of a much-needed renaissance or will end up being coaxed into acting as an on- the-scene manager for US power on the continent.
— Mahmood Mamdani is head of the Centre for African Studies at UCT