This edited extract from Ronald Suresh Roberts’s book on President Thabo Mbeki, Fit to Govern, argues that the president has protected democracy by opposing military models of change. Also read Drew Forrest’s “Neocolonials under every bed” and Fikile-Ntsikilelo Moya’s “But what about the book?“.
You do not get credit for disasters averted. On Zimbabwe, [President Thabo] Mbeki is a victim of this truism. He has been the great and insufficiently acknowledged protector of democratic models against military models of change in Zimbabwe. He has opposed not only externally imposed “regime change” but any suggestion of “good governance” by military coup.
“[Zimbabwean President Robert] Mugabe continues to preside by intimidation and terror,” Robert Rotberg wrote in the Financial Times on June 21 2006. “Until his security forces align themselves with the opposition, no rose revolution in Zimbabwe is possible without concerted action from Africa and South Africa.”
Rotberg is an indefatigable advocate of the civilising military coup. Biographer of Cecil Rhodes [and] professor at the Kennedy School of Government, Rotberg is also a leader in defining the criteria of “good governance” in Africa … So when Rotberg wrote in the London Financial Times for May 19 2003 that “Mr Mbeki could end Zimbabwe’s tragedy in a moment but is reluctant to do so”, one read on eagerly, to learn how. Rotberg explained:
“When Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator, sent troops into Tanzania in 1979, its president, Julius Nyerere, had the excuse he needed to invade Uganda and oust him. Mr Mbeki need not go that far. But if his own generals told Zimbabwe’s army commanders and palace guard that the game was up, Mr Mugabe’s protectors would quickly fall into line. Mr Mbeki must be prepared to make the case for military intervention on humanitarian grounds. Alternatively, Mr Mbeki might be able simply to order the 79-year-old autocrat to go into exile, or else … Mbeki would then be kingmaker and saviour combined. It is a time for tough love.”
It is such “tough love” that Rotberg called down upon Haiti’s head in a frankly headlined Boston Globe piece dated February 28 2004: “To save Haiti, Aristide must go.” And lo it came about: [Jean-Bertrand] Aristide was soon afterwards plucked from among his people.
Rotberg’s views are nothing if not influential. Many months before the Iraq invasion, he was to be found laying out the broader agenda under the self-explanatory headline in the Christian Science Monitor, “Why stop with Iraq?”
Constantly at odds with this anti-democratic and militarist thinking, Mbeki has laboured to preserve and build Zimbabwean democratic accountability against hard odds. Among his most important, and insufficiently noticed, interventions, was a sharp rebuke of the Zimbabwean army at a critical pre-election juncture. “Bheki Khumalo, President Thabo Mbeki’s spokesman, says the statement by Zimbabwean generals — suggesting that they will only accept a Zanu-PF government — is ‘unacceptable’.”
Confronted with the outcome of Zimbabwean elections, the Rotberg school dismisses these elections as “stolen” while saying nothing about Florida 2000 — or, for that matter, Johannesburg 1994.
South Africa offers firm evidence of how a consolidated democracy can develop from an initially unconsolidated one. What Rotberg’s militarism excludes is the long-earned wisdom that the consolidation of democracy is not a task for quick fixes. “It is estimated that 107 people have been killed in both [21st-century Zimbabwe] elections. A similar number died during the first post-apartheid election in South Africa, which was hailed as a great success,” writes Ann Talbot.
These are the subtleties Mbeki was getting at even as the war party rolled into Iraq to impose its democracy in 2003. Citing Ruth First’s classic critique of military coups, The Barrel of a Gun (1970), Mbeki stressed [in a 2003 speech] the pointlessness not only of force-fed democracy but of arbitrarily defined milestones, “democratic musts”, that schematically measure supposed progress towards democracy, often at the expense of realities on the ground.
Among the most moving contributions to the entire Zimbabwe debate was a letter submitted by the ANC MP Andrew Mlangeni, after one of Rotberg’s demands for regime change had appeared in Business Day. Signing off as “former prisoner, Robben Island, for 26 years”, Mlangeni asserted that “Rotberg’s is a familiar name to those of us who engaged in struggle to defeat colonialism and white minority rule in Southern Africa and bring about democracy.”
Mlangeni explained: “His hostility to Mugabe and the Zimbabwe liberation movement is not new. What is new is his concern for the democratic rights of the people of Zimbabwe, for which he showed no concern when the Zimbabweans were fighting the Smith regime. Not unexpectedly, he never called for anything approaching this to bring about regime change when Southern Africa was controlled by the colonial and white minority regimes.”
Mlangeni directly addressed Rotberg’s suggestion that, by refusing a military option, Mbeki was hurting South Africa as well as Zimbabwe: “Whereas then, he was Mbeki’s opponent, he now wants to use Mbeki as his instrument to achieve objectives he has pursued for decades … He has still not understood that Mbeki then, and Mbeki now, believed and believes that the job of changing governments is the responsibility of the people concerned.”