South Africa’s most critical challenge in its regional relations since the advent of democracy in 1994 has been how to engage its neighbours in ways that are different from hegemonic bullying, while still providing robust leadership among its peers.
Can the country continue to avoid the kind of unilateral interventionism that could give regional states the impression that South Africa is acting like the proverbial bull in a China shop?
When South Africa’s black majority gained political independence in 1994, the key question was whether South Africa would develop as a part of, or apart from, Southern Africa and the African continent.
The historical context for this is important. During the apartheid era South Africa was, to all intents and purposes, the region’s major destabilising force, particularly in the 1980s. A regional hegemonic role since its watershed election of 1994 has shifted the imperatives of Pax Pretoriana from being a malevolent to being a more benign giant.
This has occurred through former president Nelson Mandela’s policy of nation-building and reconciliation within the country; diplomatic engagement in South Africa’s “near abroad”; and later, through President Thabo Mbeki’s much more forthright embrace of Pax Africana: promoting peace on the continent through regional actors.
Mbeki’s twin policies of Pax South Africana and Pax Africana have therefore attempted — largely successfully — to coalesce South Africa’s interests with the larger interests of the African continent. This is one way of understanding South Africa’s leadership role in continental initiatives such as the African Union (AU) and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad).
It is therefore to be expected that Mbeki’s passion for Pax Africana — predicated on the African renaissance — dovetailed neatly with the Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa (CSSDCA) pioneered by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in 1991. It is no surprise that today Africa’s continental security agenda is driven primarily by the twin imperatives of Nepad and the CSSDCA through the AU.
Following the demise of apartheid, South Africa has begun to play a pivotal role in regional security efforts in Southern Africa, largely through the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
However, the prominent — and controversial — role that Tshwane played both militarily and diplomatically in the management of the Lesotho crises of 1994 and 1998 has contributed substantially to the concerns about South Africa’s motives in its backyard.
Following the eruption of a violent conflict in Lesotho in 1994 and several failed diplomatic attempts to resolve it, an intervention by a SADC diplomatic task force resulted in a breakthrough memorandum of agreement. This accord empowered South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe, and later Mozambique, to act on behalf of SADC in guaranteeing the fragile democracy of the mountain kingdom.
This was the first time that SADC had taken such a bold and decisive action in a regional political crisis.
Tshwane played a major mediation role in Lesotho’s later crisis in 1998, though dispatching Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi, and not the minister of foreign affairs, to manage Lesotho’s troubles was an unmistakable indication of the lowly position that the country occupied in South Africa’s pecking order.
There are sharply divided perceptions about the nature and character of South Africa’s military deployment in Lesotho in 1998. But whether perceived as an “invasion” or “intervention”, the stark reality is that South Africa and a small contingent from Botswana were able to quell Lesotho’s near civil war after mediation efforts by local civil society and churches had ended in dismal failure. Ironically, the mission was not managed through SADC’s then embattled Organ for Politics, Defence and Security (OPDS).
The organ was paralysed by a deep-seated six-year crisis that centred on competing calls for either its independence or full integration with SADC. This dispute generated mutual distrust and tension among SADC members and largely prevented the OPDS from responding to multiple conflicts in the region.
Between the 1998 and 1999 SADC summits, there were rival perceptions between South Africa and Zimbabwe about the functionality of the OPDS. However, the 1999 SADC summit in Maputo, Mozambique, finally broke the impasse and during the substantive SADC summit in Blantyre, Malawi, in 2001 a decision relating to the amicable restructuring of the OPDS was officially adopted.
For its part, and primarily through the facility of multilateral institutions, South Africa today seems poised to play a major role in ensuring peace and security in the SADC region and on the African continent. During 2004, for example, the South African Foreign Minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, chaired the AU’s newly-established Peace and Security Council (PSC); South Africa hosts the 265-member Pan-African Parliament, largely footing its bill of about $100-million; and South Africa was chair of the OPDS from August 2004 to August 2005.
It is against this backdrop of South Africa’s historical role in regional security that the deeper significance of its policymakers’ belief that “South Africa’s development is dependent on increased security, democracy and economic growth and development in Southern Africa and the rest of the continent” can be better understood.
Still, with a changing of the guard in the Union Buildings an imminent inevitability in 2009, only time will tell if South Africa is able to resist the lure of playing the schoolyard bully in its backyard.
Khabele Matlosa is the research director at the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, in Johannesburg