In their complex and protracted mediation efforts in Africa, South African negotiators have long since learned not to believe everything they read on the news pages.
But they dare not ignore the finance pages.
So when the New Forces rebel movement in Côte d’Ivoire reportedly pronounced the mediation efforts dead and buried this week, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad remained sanguine.
South Africa’s ambassador to Abidjan, Dumisani Gwadiso, was in the field with United Nations (UN) peacekeepers looking at demobilisation sites.
Ivorean Prime Minister Seydou Diarra was packing his bags to visit South Africa for talks with President Thabo Mbeki.
”If the talks are dead then what else is on the agenda?” asked Pahad. ”Our reports say that the process is continuing … this mediation is an African Union operation. If it is dead, somebody has to tell them.”
Within hours, the commodities markets were reporting three-month highs in cocoa prices — the backbone of the Côte d’Ivoire economy.
Whatever the politicians were saying, the money men were reacting to reports that rebels had killed 30 militiamen and arrested 80 more.
Richard Cornwell of the Institute for Security Studies said the latest incursions appear to have been launched by militiamen backed by the government of Laurent Gbagbo.
”As such they are deniable. They tried to break through the UN lines in the west — the heart of the coffee and cocoa growing area. It appears to be a probe and a provocation.”
Gbagbo dare not openly claim responsibility for the action, although those close to him claim to have broken the back of the rebels.
When he broke the ceasefire last November, it moved the UN Security Council to slap an arms embargo and ”smart sanctions” on his government.
Diarra arrived in Cape Town as frustrated as ever.
Mbeki has painstakingly included him in all aspects of the mediation effort, even though his post as prime minister remains a pretty toothless one until Gbagbo can be forced to meet his commitment to hand some executive power to him.
Mbeki badly needs some tangible signs of progress in his three-month mediation effort. He is still silently stinging from the assertion by French President Jacques Chirac last month that Mbeki’s results had been underwhelming. Chirac suggested that the South African leader lacked understanding of West African psychology.
This was manna for Gbagbo, who is increasingly coming under the screws from Mbeki to comply with the terms of the Linas Marcoussis peace deal brokered by France.
The Ivorean president went off to Morocco’s King Mohammed VI to ask him to take over the mediation role.
Making such a request of the only African country to have shunned the African Union amounted to thumbing his nose at the continental organisation that is pressing him harder to keep his peace promises.
Gbagbo was persuaded that he had gone too far. He denied asking for Mohammed VI’s assistance, just as the king had fired up his propaganda machine to proclaim a new dawn of African acceptability for Morocco. Rabat has withdrawn its ambassador from Abidjan.