The pressure on Robert Mugabe is gathering force following last week’s Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit with Thabo Mbeki’s appointed team of officials, from the presidency and foreign affairs, who are talking to the main protagonists in the Zimbabwean crisis.
”There is now greater awareness … that there is a problem in the country and that the solution can only be derived through dialogue,” said Mukoni Ratshitanga, the presidential spokesperson.
Mbeki confidently told the Financial Times this week that Mugabe will step down willingly, while Mozambican President Armando Guebuza has also spoken out against the Zimbabwean government, expressing concern about Harare’s failure to pay its electricity bills and Zimbabwean nationals smuggling goods across its porous borders.
This week, Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai — who was in South Africa for medical consultations after his assault last month — also met with Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu, and former United States secretary of state Madeleine Albright.
Meanwhile, MDC negotiators were in meetings with South African government officials this week, and much of the MDC leadership is scheduled to arrive in South Africa for a consultative retreat in the days ahead.
Chief among the MDC’s demands is that elections cannot be held under the existing constitutional and electoral framework. MDC officials argue that the party won’t rush into an electoral process that will deliver flawed results.
Mbeki this week said that his mediation efforts will focus on MDC demands for constitutional and electoral reforms, including repealing the information access and security laws that have been used to ban newspapers critical of the government and to bar political meetings.
An MDC source told the Mail & Guardian that the South African government is working on two scenarios. One scenario, reflected in Mbeki’s recent pronouncements about ”genuinely free and fair” elections, will involve sweeping electoral reforms will include the constitutional reforms that the MDC has been campaigning for. But Mbeki reportedly believes there may not be enough time to achieve constitutional reform before the elections scheduled for March next year: ”Mbeki is saying a constitutional reform process will take a longer time,” the source said.
It is believed that Mbeki prefers a second scenario for change, which is based on internal reform of Zanu-PF. According to this scenario, Mugabe will step down at the December national conference, three months before the elections, and Joyce Mujuru will be appointed as acting president. In the three months before the elections, Mujuru would have enough time to consolidate her position as state president. This, analysts say, is why Mbeki was bold enough to say that Mugabe will step down willingly.
At home in Zimbabwe, some are also questioning whether Zanu-PF officially endorsed Mugabe as the next presidential candidate at their meeting in late March. Former minister Jonathan Moyo said the central committee meeting which endorsed Mugabe last week was unprocedural. ”No one moved a motion to nominate him, no one seconded it and Mugabe himself did not accept the nomination.”
According to the second scenario, Zimbabwe’s Parliament will be expanded from 150 seats to 210 and the upper house (Senate) will be expanded from 66 seats to 84 to ”accommodate the various factions”.
Meanwhile, discussions to reunite the two factions of the MDC are apparently at an advanced stage: ”The next month will see the reunification of the divided opposition,” the source said. Mbeki has reportedly told the factions that he wants to speak to a united MDC.
But, as the MDC wins friends in the region, the situation in Zimbabwe has worsened considerably over the past few weeks, with a significant deterioration in the human-rights record. The abduction of opposition supporters is a sinister new development, and people are now regularly being picked up, beaten and dumped.
Edward Chikombo, a cameraman for the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, was reportedly abducted from his home in the Glenview township outside Harare last week, and has since been found dead. It is thought that the killing may be linked to the smuggling out of the country of television pictures of the badly injured Tsvangirai.
Although Mugabe claims the Dar es Salaam SADC meeting as a victory, he was in fact censured by the assembly of regional leaders. An analyst in Zimbabwe said this week that the crisis in the country is now at the top of SADC’s agenda. The region also openly supported the idea of national dialogue in Zimbabwe and the repeal of repressive legislation. Mugabe cannot have wanted that.
The analyst argued that, for the first time, SADC is speaking with one voice on Zimbabwe and that this could make a difference. ”I’m cautiously optimistic — the regime is lashing out because it is desperate, its actions can be seen as the last kicks of a dying horse.”
”What South Africa needs to do now is to continue to enunciate, loud and clear, the principles underpinning its foreign policy — born out of South Africa’s own liberation — to continue disowning Mugabe’s tyranny,” the analyst added.