Howard Barrell
OVER A BARREL
The first secretary general of the United Nations, who had the rather unfortunate name Trygve Lie, once remarked that a “real diplomat is one who can cut his neighbour’s throat without having his neighbour notice it”.
None of us is privy to what happened at the summit at Victoria Falls last Friday between Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, our own Thabo Mbeki, Mozambique’s Joachim Chissano and Namibia’s Sam Nujoma. Yet I suspect that Mugabe – and let us clearly distinguish his fate from Zimbabwe’s – is about to find out that Mbeki is an accomplished diplomat.
The Mail & Guardian’s editorial on the eve of the summit on the crisis Mugabe has induced in Zimbabwe advised Mbeki to “talk softly but carry a big stick”. I think we probably got the “big stick” part wrong. Mbeki would not beat anybody around the head. We should have advised Mbeki – though there was probably no need – not to leave his cut-throat razor behind.
I would not be surprised to hear in the next few weeks and months that Mugabe’s political head has toppled off his shoulders. Let’s wait and see.
As we wait, we have a moment to reflect on the state of our foreign policy and whether, or when, softly-softly diplomacy is preferable to the megaphone variety.
The first point to be made is that our foreign policy is now being formulated – from conception to execution – very largely at political level. Increasingly, that means at presidential level.
A trend in this direction was to be expected with the arrival of a president with a real aptitude for diplomacy and experience of it. But the extent to which it has become the pattern over the past year must give cause for concern.
Mbeki and his office are now involved in the minutiae of foreign policy. Our Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, makes the rest of the running. Aziz Pahad, her deputy, has been almost entirely sidelined. Pahad now has a sort of consultative status on South America and the Middle East.
The new Director General, Sipho Pityana, meanwhile, has involved himself in the minutiae of memoranda. His officials say he has set so exacting a bureaucratic paper chase for them to follow – which includes precise and detailed instructions from him about which parts of any submission should be in upper or lower case and which parts in bold – that, with the best will in the world, they are now hard pressed to find the time to generate policy options. His office recently offered officials a workshop at the Union Buildings on the form and style in which to write a submission. Morale among his officials, not surprisingly, has hit a new low – among both black and white, new regime and old, I hasten to add.
What this means is that officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs – both new and old regime – have become only residual to the formulation of our foreign policy. Desk officers seldom get briefings on what the president or their minister has done in areas of the world for which they are responsible. And this has created difficulties in following up initiatives and ensuring that our foreign policy is – or, at least, seems to other countries to be – co-ordinated and coherent.
“We are just becoming window-dressing,” said one official at foreign affairs this week. “We will soon just be a protocol office – the president or the minister will take a decision and we will just make the travel arrangements.”
The problem this creates is that people with considerable expertise in foreign affairs – and they come from both sides of the old apartheid fence – are seldom being called upon to provide the input and advice they are paid for. The professionals are being excluded.
This is making our foreign policy more opaque and less professionalised than is suitable for a democracy that heads both the Commonwealth and Non-Aligned Movement, and which has ambitions to take a seat on an enlarged United Nations Security Council.
The confidence I expressed at the outset that Mbeki had his way at Vic Falls and that Mugabe’s days in politics are as good as over relies on a little personal knowledge of Mbeki, some experience of his way of working, an Aesopian though generous briefing from a government official last week, a belief that Mbeki is more than smart enough to see that Batty Bob is a danger to the entire region and a lot of speculation.
That may sometimes do for a journalist if it is true that, as someone once remarked, journalists and what they write have “roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics”.
But there are many people who need to know – unequivocally – what our position is on Mugabe’s behaviour. First, South Africans need to know – have a right to know, I would have thought – whether our government is saying to Mugabe that flouting the rule of law and property rights is unacceptable. Likewise, we need to know whether we still apply the Mandela doctrine: that national sovereignty does not excuse a leader from having to explain himself to the world when he behaves undemocratically.
But considerations go beyond the Mandela doctrine in this instance. For we have a direct interest in the outcome in Zimbabwe. The chaos Mugabe has induced is directly and adversely affecting us.
And this brings us to another group of people who need to know – unequivocally – what our attitude is on Zimbabwe and how we feel about the rule of law and property rights. They are the men and women in the financial markets and the investors whose millions of dollars, euros, marks and yens we need if we are ever to generate the millions of jobs we require to secure social peace and democracy within our own borders.
And these investors have not been kept informed, and they have not been reassured by our foreign policy over the past fortnight. We have apparently employed the softly-softly approach on the calculation that this will improve our chances of getting Mugabe and his party to do what we need them to do in order not to harm the investment climate in the region. But the cost of our not speaking out loudly in defence of the rule of law and property rights in the region appears to be exactly what we sought to avoid: a run on the rand, an exodus of money and a more jaundiced attitude towards our region among potential sources of foreign fixed investment.
Perhaps it needed a foreign affairs department official to warn the politicians of that result at the outset.