Saturday’s meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Thabo Mbeki could be the most historic for Zimbabwe since the Lancaster House negotiations of the late 1970s. Indeed, despite official denials to the contrary, the summit meeting between Blair and Mbeki at the United Kingdom prime minister’s Chequers home is likely to focus on one key issue: can a solution be found to the crisis in Zimbabwe?
The timing of the meeting is apposite. With Blair increasingly fighting domestic and international fires, this may be the last opportunity for some time for these two global leaders to forge a constructive programme to lift Zimbabwe out of its malaise. More to the point, the Zimbabwean economy and, in turn, its citizens, have perhaps six months left before the onset of an unprecedented humanitarian disaster. At the political level, both leaders have a vested interest in turning around Zimbabwe from a New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) millstone into an exemplar.
There are three good reasons why the UK in particular should play a role in assisting to resolve the Zimbabwe crisis.
The first relates to the nature of the British colonial legacy which, by UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s own admission, has often been at the root of subsequent problems in Africa. Playing a central role in the successful resolution of the Zimbabwean crisis would serve Britain well both domestically and internationally, particularly among developing countries with which it is likely to experience increasingly strained relations due to its airtight support for United States President George W Bush’s war on the “Axis of Evil”.
Second, renewed and enhanced UK financial assistance in tackling the Zimbabwean land crisis would serve to confront head-on the purported major issue of contention, while simultaneously helping to unlock a wider internal political settlement. Funding pragmatic and sustainable land reform is not only crucial for the recovery of the Zimbabwean economy; it would serve to undermine Zanu-PF’s most popular and populist political plank.
And third, such a “partnered agreement”, if it were to come about, would cement the underlying arguments behind Nepad, reinforcing an otherwise declining Western stake in African transformation. It also removes Zimbabwe as a major stumbling block for Nepad and for improved UK relations with Africa and in particular South Africa.
But, correspondingly, there are three reasons why such an agreement would be a bad idea.
First, it would over-emphasise the UK role and the land issue as the core reasons behind Zimbabwe’s current troubles. It could thereby serve to overshadow the role of pernicious leadership, maladministration, disastrous economic policies and the subjugation of democratic norms as underlying causes.
Second, related to the above, by restating the relevance of the imperial legacy, it serves to remove a degree of responsibility from African leaders in solving problems, and shifts this back to the international community. While the colonial inheritance is an insurmountable burden for Africa’s leadership to carry alone, playing the colonial card has, at least when viewing the 40 years of Africa’s post-independence history, not helped deal with these problems. More often it has been used as a blunt tool by African leadership to deflect attention from its own failings. Â
Third, and arguably most importantly, it runs the risk that such an agreement is viewed as an end in itself. That settling the land question will, put crudely, translate into the stabilisation of the economy and the political environment. This is also to downplay the importance of engaging with opposition movements in Zimbabwe, both within the Movement for Democratic Change and civil society.
Obviously the international community wants to assist in finding a way to end the crisis where it can. To do so it has to take its lead from the region’s states, which clearly have the greatest stake. Thus any agreement has to be premised on a clear understanding of what the South African government’s goals are with regard to Zimbabwe. Is it to remove President Robert Mugabe from power? Is it to keep in power a sanitised, Mugabe-less Zanu-PF? Is it to establish a government of national unity in its own, post-apartheid image? Is it to re-establish, as one would hope, a democratic process, leading to fresh, internationally-supervised elections? Quiet diplomacy answers none of these key questions, but rather appears to be an end in itself.
Mbeki and Blair are (perhaps uncomfortably) umbilically tied on the issue of Zimbabwe. Both share a degree of responsibility to assist Zimbabwe out of its crisis and both have much to gain from a partnered solution. Both are committed to foreign policies that advance human rights, human dignity, good governance, economic development and the rule of law. Thus failure to forge a common and constructive policy will have acutely damaging implications for this political duo, not to mention the people of Zimbabwe, the region and its partners. But until the longer-term goals of such an agreement are clarified, any South Africa-UK-led attempt to facilitate an end to the Zimbabwe crisis runs the risk of excusing the appalling governance that has sparked it in the first instance. Moreover, in doing so, it also reinforces perceptions and practices of external obligation, which, by Africans’ own admission, created these conditions.
The long-term answer to Zimbabwe’s situation must rest in stressing due legal process and democracy over expediency; and internal process over external intervention. And a strategy for engagement should follow clearly defined goals, not the other way around. During the Chequers meeting the glare of the Southern African region will be focused on Mbeki and Blair. It is no time to blink.
Dr Greg Mills and Tim Hughes are respectively the national director and the parliamentary research fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs