Iden Wetherell
CROSSFIRE
As European Union governments attempt to stem the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki has identified a new contagion that is threatening to cross the Limpopo and infect South Africa. It is a variant of racism that might elude visitors from the planet Mars, he claims, but has not escaped his scrutiny. Writing in his party’s online publication, ANC Today, Mbeki argues that the disease takes the form of scepticism about his government’s determination to uphold the rule of law and safeguard property rights. He compares the “frenzy of fear and hatred” white South Africans display over Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to stereotypes about black majority rule in South Africa.
It is an interesting point. But unfortunately it provides a smokescreen behind which a more damaging stereotype has found purchase on the public consciousness that of ensconced rulers in the region conspiring to thwart democratic change. As Mbeki prepares for the latest in a series of meetings with Zimbabwe’s recalcitrant ruler it is evident his cloudy analysis of the issues at stake are an obstacle to progress. Contrary to his fevered imaginings, this is not about Tony Leon and the Democratic Alliance taking advantage of policy paralysis in Pretoria. Nor is it about faithless whites refusing to take the government at its word. It is about South Africa’s inability to do the right thing in terms of the African National Congress’s own publicly declared positions.
If the South African government supports democracy and human rights in the region why is it unable to say so? If it believes in good governance why doesn’t it communicate that message to its neighbours? As it is, since their first summit on the Zimbabwe crisis in April last year, Mbeki has indulged Mugabe by engaging in the pretence that land not misrule is at the root of the crisis unfolding north of the Limpopo. He has made it clear South Africa can best assist Zimbabwe by remaining silent on lawlessness. Since then Mugabe’s Zanu-PF government has conscripted and armed its supporters, unleashing them against opposition members and civic activists. Court rulings have been ignored, judges threatened and newspaper premises bombed.
None of this, it seems, is of any worry to South African ministers. Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Penuell Maduna was happy to accept assurances from his Zimbabwean counterpart Patrick Chinamasa that Zimbabwe upholds the rule of law. Maduna declined to enquire why the authorities have failed to prosecute a single Zanu-PF supporter implicated in political killings last year. The land experts Pretoria is sending to Zimbabwe following a recent interministerial meeting will see a programme that benefits only ruling-party supporters. They will see once-productive farms vandalised by state-sponsored occupiers who produce nothing. It is difficult to know what help the South African specialists can provide in a situation where armed militias reign supreme.
The 1998 United Nations-brokered agreement on land reform, to which Mbeki regularly refers, was junked by Mugabe last year when he decided it was an obstacle to his populist demagoguery. There is no going back, he says. This is not a case of the government overturning colonial statutes. It has disregarded its own laws on land acquisition passed in 1992 and last year.
Contrary to Mbeki’s public pronouncements, the British government is keen to underwrite land reform. It has 36-million set aside for that purpose. But it is not unnatural that donors should want to see a transparent and legal land reform programme that benefits the poor. Most Zimbabweans want to see the same thing. South African ministers repeat the mantra that Zimbabwe has a legitimate government that deserves help. In fact, a majority of Zimbabweans voted against Zanu-PF in last June’s election. The government’s parliamentary hegemony derives from 30 members appointed by Mugabe. Electoral intimidation also plays a role. The help Zimbabweans need most is in establishing the rule of law. When the Movement for Democratic Change tried to appeal against what it felt were fraudulent outcomes in 37 constituencies last year, Mugabe issued an edict blocking the party’s court applications. It was the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the right to appeal that led to the threats against judges and the replacement of Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay with a Mugabe stooge. Maduna appears to have no problem with that either! The impression that South Africa is prepared to discard the foreign policy principles it set out after 1994 and collude with a government that maintains itself in office by suborning the police and army, intimidating the judiciary and attacking citizens, is the single most damaging stereotype that Pretoria has allowed to emerge.
Zimbabweans who stood by South Africans in the struggle for freedom feel betrayed by Mbeki’s inability to detach himself from misplaced loyalty to a malevolent dictatorship in Harare. What is the point of championing an “African renaissance”, they ask, when he can’t even enunciate its underlying principles for fear of offending Mugabe?
It is a valid question. And if Mbeki insists on getting it wrong on Zimbabwe because he feels the opposition, civil society and whites in South Africa are ganging up against him, what else will he bungle out of misplaced pride? Seeing a conspiracy behind demands for the restoration of law only convinces world opinion of the similarities between paranoid rulers on both sides of the Limpopo! If there is a disease, it is the malady associated with governments that cannot provide effective leadership when it is required, hiding instead behind evocations of nationalist struggle. Zimbabwe needs South Africa to adopt an unambiguous position on governance that sets a standard for the region. Pretoria’s constructive engagement has failed. Since last April 34 people have been killed, thousands of farm workers displaced and tens of thousands of Zimbabweans rendered jobless by the economic dislocation Mugabe’s policies have produced. Mbeki’s latest ramblings on Martian visitors and racism have been reproduced with enthusiasm this week by Zimbabwe’s official media as another sign of solidarity between the ANC and Zanu-PF. By supporting Mugabe’s damaging dictatorship Mbeki is standing firmly in the way of democratic progress and making South Africa look not just helpless but unprincipled.
It is that perception he needs to worry about. Iden Wetherell is editor of the Zimbabwe Independent