The African National Congress has engaged in a long series of “winks and nudges” in dealing with the human rights abuses and autocratic behaviour of President Robert Mugabe, says official opposition Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon.
In his regular internet column on Friday, SA Today, he said Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka may have been joking when she said on Wednesday that South Africa “learned a few lessons from Zimbabwe” on land reform.
“Yet her banter, as government spin doctors described it, is actually the latest in a long series of winks and nudges from ANC government officials who approve in principle, if not in practice, of much of what Robert Mugabe does.
“Two years ago, for example, Labour Minister Membathisi Mdlalana was quoted as saying that ‘South Africa had a lot to learn about land reform from its neighbour [Zimbabwe]’.
“It seems that no amount of human rights abuses, autocratic behaviour or economic destruction can shake the faith of ANC leaders in their former comrade-in-arms.
“Indeed, Mugabe’s ‘cocking a snook’ or giving a ‘two’s-up’ to whiteys and the West seems to appeal to a sizeable constituency in the ANC, even though there are some prominent individuals in the ruling party who are privately appalled by what Mugabe is up to.
“It took the apartheid government 16 years to forcibly remove about 60 000 people from District Six in Cape Town.
“In contrast, it took Mugabe only a few weeks to forcibly remove about ten times as many people — about 700 000, according to the report of United Nations envoy Anna Tibaijuka — from the cities of Zimbabwe in Operation Murambatsvina.”
Leon said: “Somehow, the ANC has failed to see that what was wrong in the 1960s and 1970s remains wrong today.”
He added that South Africa should, instead of its present course, be insisting on the implementation of a road map to democracy, which would incorporate plans for the departure of Mugabe from office, the establishment of an interim government, the drafting of a new Constitution and the holding of fresh elections. — I-Net Bridge