Once again South Africa?s economy is being undermined by events over which our government has little control. The value of our currency ? hence the price of locally grown maize, as well as our imports ? and our aspirations for Africa, in the form of the New Partnership for Africa?s Development (Nepad), are being threatened by what is happening in Zimbabwe.
The impression is given that this is predictable and fair. You would think what is happening in Zimbabwe is our fault and we should be punished.
South Africans (especially but not exclusively white) have fallen, like a pack, upon our president over Zimbabwe. It is as though Thabo Mbeki could have prevented Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe?s brutalities over land distribution and created conditions for free and fair elections.
The fact is that South Africa is in the most appalling dilemma. Our northern neighbour, with whom we are extensively linked through trade, transport and kinship, is being driven by a fearful ? but elected ? leader to the brink of economic shambles and a political and human- rights disaster. The usual international problem of what to do about destructive leadership is compounded when that leadership is a neighbour.
Shouldn?t our population show some sympathy for our government?s cleft-stick position, if only to explain to the less-informed outside world that the view from Pretoria is a little different to that from Washington or London.
None of the furious critics of Mbeki have shown how he could have prevented or limited the Mugabe folly but have fed on the idea that Mbeki should be doing ?something? different.
Mugabe?s paranoia is a matter of public record. Tony Blair?s forthright rejection produced nothing whatever for Zimbabweans, but exclusion of British election monitors.
Indeed, it was recognition of that dynamic that originally led the British and the Americans themselves privately to propose a good-cop-bad-cop split between Mbeki and themselves, with Mbeki playing the former. Every serious journalist in South Africa knows that ? the private briefings were clear. But do you know that? I wonder why not.
Ah but, I hear you say, it is not about controlling Mugabe; it?s about distancing ourselves from his policies. So why have so few of us clocked the many statements from Mbeki?s office doing precisely that? The reason is that the constant media and opposition refrain that Mbeki is ?doing nothing about it? or even condoning it, drowns out the reality.
In a major interview with Naspers last year, for instance, Mbeki condemned the land grabs, limitations on the media and the judiciary and other excesses. On November 30, Business Day headlined ?President speaks out on Zimbabwe?. But a statement from Mbeki at the Victoria Falls Southern African Development Community conference that Mugabe?s policies were ?unacceptable? to Africa was not reported in South Africa. Nor is he given credit for the fact that he is the only Commonwealth leader who has bearded Mugabe in his den, by voicing his criticisms within Zimbabwe itself.
Notice also that while this hounding of Mbeki over Zimbabwe has taken place, Zambia and Madagascar have both held elections, results of which have been widely contested as rigged. Where is the demand that our government distance itself from those results? And while Zimbabwe has been ? in my view rightly ? suspended from the Commonwealth, why the silence over other Commonwealth countries represented in its councils by unelected regimes?
The answer, we are told, is that Mbeki must prove to us that he is not soft on another black leader who is behaving badly in a racially charged situation. If Mbeki does not distance himself from Mugabe, it is said, we will be forced to tar him with the same brush as far as white citizens are concerned. So race is key to it: our old friend Afro-scepticism, alias racism.
Thus the race card is played, but not acknowledged. Of course the world, the Commonwealth and South Africa should condemn Mugabe?s rigged elections, as well as those elsewhere. And so they have: even our own ambiguous monitors have said the elections were not free and fair. But this is an international problem. And South Africa?s unique dilemma should be recognised; and its government supported in the leadership it has given within its unique constraints. Especially by our own people.