Some years ago, Festus Mogae, President of Botswana, translated a phrase from Setswana to explain his mode of transport. “No individual can see the top of her own head,” he told reporters. The proverb, in his native tongue, is a counsel for humility.
Mogae was speaking to incredulous journalists who had remarked on his choice of a scheduled commercial flight while on an official presidential trip — in spite of his country’s diamond riches. His words are a telling comment on the more base temptations of power, especially at a time when authorities in Zimbabwe resort to abduction and torture of their critics.
Last month, while opposition leaders in Zimbabwe were being beaten in police custody, Mogae was preparing to open a workshop of African parliamentarians. Drawing again on the dignity of his native culture, Mogae observed that there is a saying in Setswana, that “the cure of a word is to speak it”.
Alas, the opposite seems true in Zimbabwe. Even as Mogae spoke in favour of more democracy, state authorities in Harare were resorting to abduction and torture of their critics. The crackdown of March 11 has been dubbed Zimbabwe’s “3/11” — as if to imply that it marks a tipping point in the country’s history.
Whether this turns out to be true will depend in large part on the stance adopted by other African states ahead of elections in Zimbabwe next year. It has become clear that Mugabe is increasingly out of step with a critical mass of thinking among African leaders.
Ghanaian president John Kufuor, current chairperson of the African Union, has admitted to being “embarrassed” by events in Zimbabwe. Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has described Zimbabwe as a sinking Titanic. Mugabe — to extend Mwanawasa’s analogy — is rearranging the chairs of patronage on deck, clinging to the wheel while he steers the nation into murky waters.
Botswana’s Mogae and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete say dialogue with the opposition is necessary. In contrast, Mugabe talks of “bashing” his opposition. He has told Western powers that have condemned his actions to “go hang”. Even bishops within his own Catholic Church are alarmed by his choice of words, a language verging on hate speech.
It is as if Mugabe is still reading daily devotions from the old Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. Despite the emphasis on human rights entrenched in the African Union Constitutive Act, adopted by the AU in July 2002, Zimbabwe’s president appears to have internalised some colonial-era black inferiority complex.
Practical action must be taken now to address this fundamental gap between Mugabe’s headspace and the thinking of a group of serious African leaders. His behaviour seems to imply that Africans need somebody else to tell them they are hungry. In the past, this role went to the communists. Today it is Tony Blair and the white commercial farmers.
First, we must be clear that torture, abductions, terror and repression of media and rights of assembly are not matters for negotiation. These are infractions of African treaty law and must stop.
This must be spelt out to Mugabe immediately, even if his octogenarian eyesight genuinely cannot discern any difference between Tony Blair, Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara, or whether or not grandmother Sekai Holland, national executive committee member of the Movement for Democratic Change, or opposition leader Priscilla Mushonga are really “Blair’s whores” — as Zanu has sought to portray them.
In 2010, South Africa will host the World Cup. A sure way to spoil this opportunity for the world to witness the competencies of post-apartheid southern Africa is to have another flawed election in Zimbabwe. A credible “road map” towards internationally supervised elections is crucial.
A first step would be the dismantling of repressive security and media legislation. Second, transitional measures should emphasise impartial control of key institutions such as the military, intelligence and the police. The Constitution is so deeply flawed that another Lancaster House — more deal-making and constitutional tinkering — will not help.
These reforms are achievable if undertaken now. Churches, opposition political actors, ruling party people, civil society, trade unions and business have an opportunity to frame a genuinely national post-conflict Constitution. This is what South Africans did in the Kempton Park discussions. Zimbabweans have the skills for the task.
The Southern Africa Development Community must not allow Mugabe to indulge in the warped and self-serving rhetoric that Zimbabwe has been holding elections according to the SADC Principles and Guidelines on Democratic Elections — a set of standards agreed at Grand Baie, Mauritius, in August 2004.
These principles are compromised because they are legally subordinate to the national processes, laws and constitutions of SADC member states. Election monitors, for example, are merely optional. According to the regional principles, monitoring takes place only “in the event a member state decides to extend an invitation to SADC to observe its elections”.
The principles require political parties to accept election results from the moment they are “proclaimed to have been free and fair by the competent national electoral authorities in accordance with the law of the land”. There is no caveat about how those authorities are to be chosen in the first place, nor what standards should constitute a democratic minimum for the “law of the land”.
Thus, the SADC has claimed recently that Zimbabwe’s elections over the last seven years have been free and fair and satisfied SADC norms. Regional governments should recall the findings of an SADC Parliamentary Forum — made up of more than 2 000 regional legislators — which declared that Zimbabwe’s March 2002 elections were fraudulent.
That verdict earned the Parliamentary Forum a one-way ticket out of Zimbabwe. Similarly, the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights has condemned Zimbabwe. Civil society entities across the region — from trade unions in South Africa to lawyers in Mozambique and university students in Swaziland — are demonstrating their anger at abuses perpetrated by Mugabe’s regime.
In his new book, Looting Africa, Patrick Bond recalls Frantz Fanon’s admonition regarding post-colonial African unity. The same political formula which had “served to bring immense pressure to bear on colonialism”, argued Fanon, soon became redundant once the nationalist liberation phase had passed: “African unity takes off the mask, and crumbles into regionalism inside the hollow shell of nationality itself.”
This is happening now in Zimbabwe. For the sake of African people, who are hungry and without medicines in Zimbabwe, African leaders must forbid Mugabe from taking Africa’s name in vain. His lieutenants are looting Zimbabwe, hiding behind the bush of a purported Africanist brotherhood, while their leader tortures and abducts fellow citizens.
Each day of inaction brings Zimbabwe a step closer to another ten years of escalating crisis. The ramifications for the region will only get worse: Harare owes unpaid electricity bills to Mozambique, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, while the humanitarian crisis has spilled across borders to reach the doorsteps of Zimbabwe’s neighbours. Above all, Mugabe has become a demeaning misrepresentation of what it means to be an African leader.
Tawanda Mutasah is a Zimbabwean lawyer who previously directed the Zimbabwe Council of Churches’ Justice and Peace Programme