Mugabe’s defeat is Mbeki’s, too

Two ideas of Africa and of how to bring about change in the world clashed at the Commonwealth summit in Abuja. One sees Africa as a failed region that will have to be gradually induced, with much surveillance by outsiders, to do better. The other sees a continent that, in order to come into its own, will have to join and perhaps lead a radical re-ordering of global economic and political power. The attempted coup over Zimbabwe at the summit displayed this division, but it also brought on to the scales the weight of those states that regard both positions as extreme.

The consequences of the coup’s failure may be, as the optimists hope, that the end for the Mugabe regime has been brought nearer and that the Commonwealth has been strengthened by sticking to the positions on democracy, the rule of law and human rights that it so often rhetorically endorses. Against that, a disappointed South Africa could become a more difficult partner, because the summit represents above all a defeat for the ambitious foreign policy that has emerged under Thabo Mbeki.

Mbeki tried to do something that would have been regarded as pretty amazing had it not been attempted inside an organisation that many wrongly regard as belonging to the backwaters of international life. He tried simultaneously to depose its secretary general and restore full membership to a country that by common consent is even further derelict in democratic practice, the observance of human rights and good government than it was when suspended in early 2002. To do this he forged an alliance of southern African states and got the support of all the south Asian members except Bangladesh for the candidate who stood against Don McKinnon, the New Zealander seeking a second term as secretary general.

Presumably the hope was that most African states and enough Caribbean and Pacific states to make up a majority would follow. Had the southern Africans and the south Asians been successful in their two objectives, that would truly have been an outcome with implications going well beyond the Commonwealth. The white states and others that opposed Zimbabwe’s return to full membership would have had to make the best of whatever arrangements for monitoring might have been attached and to accept a new secretary general. But they would have done so with gritted teeth, while relations between America, with its strong position on Mugabe, and many African states would also have suffered.

It is true that if a restoration of membership to Zimbabwe led to an agreement between government and opposition and to Mugabe’s swift departure from power, as South Africa argued, all these consequences would be ameliorated. But even if that were to have happened, the Commonwealth would have abandoned the strict conditionality on which it had earlier agreed.

Did the supporters of Zimbabwe come to Abuja with the idea that they might actually win? Mugabe may well have thought so. According to some reports, he had an aeroplane standing by at Harare airport to fly him to Nigeria. In the event, the coup failed fairly comprehensively in its first phase: the election of the secretary general. The Sri Lankan candidate got four south Asian and six southern African votes. He got no east African, west African or Pacific votes, and only one from the Caribbean.

After this defeat, indicative of the balance of opinion on both issues, it was highly unlikely that Zimbabwe was going to be brought back into the fold. No doubt some countries that voted for McKinnon sympathised with South Africa’s push, or with Zimbabwe, but it was not a make-or-break issue for them, particularly as it was clear that this was not a well-planned or well-prepared effort.

South African foreign policy displays contradictory strands. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on cooperation with western countries, both as economic partners and as states sharing in the liberal and democratic tradition to which South Africa has returned. On the other hand, the ANC in office is the continuation of a radical liberation movement imbued with ”anti-western sentiment, not informed by direct interests, but rather by a history of colonialism and apartheid and the socialist background of many members of the … leadership,” as a recent study puts it*.

Mbeki in particular is identified with the idea that there has to be a global redistribution of power. It is not remotely a new idea, but nor is it one that has lost its force or relevance. African societies find themselves in the situation of being at the same time victims of western policies, both past and present, and of being forced to sit still for moral lectures on their political iniquities.

In the case of the African big four — Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa – they also find themselves identified by the US as ”preferred partners”, an honour that they may find both flattering and disquieting. The South African government has not found President Bush a reassuring figure. It has been in the front rank of opposition to his Iraq policies and is resistant to American pressure on Zimbabwe.

The leading role Mbeki has played in launching both the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and the African Union show him as a man who wants Africa to be a power in the world and to create institutions that will make its economic and political development self-sustaining and that will allow it to do itself whatever surveillance and monitoring of African states may be required. He is also a leader attached to the idea that the transition from liberation movement to dominant party in an African country does not necessarily have to be followed by a further transition to a true multi-party system that allows alternation in power. Zimbabwe embodies the need for that second transition, and its opposition leadership comes from the same social quarter — the trade unions — that could in future provide a counterweight to the ANC in South Africa.

The ANC’s rural supporters may see in Mugabe’s ”reforms” only that land has gone from white to black people and not that a vital national industry has in the process been destroyed. So, for both high-minded reasons and because of more cynical considerations of political advantage, Mbeki has chosen a certain course.

The first difficulty is that at the ambitious, African level the policies may be beyond South Africa’s resources. The second is that at the more expedient level they can also be counter-productive, at home and abroad. The Abuja summit, which illustrates both difficulties, ought to have a sobering effect in Pretoria.