As South African President Thabo Mbeki prepared to present his progress report on the mediation process in Zimbabwe to regional leaders gathered at this week’s Southern African Development Community summit, Zimbabwean Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa was insisting that there was no need for political reform in Zimbabwe.
In an interview with the media, Chinamasa, one of Zanu-PF’s negotiators at the Pretoria talks, said: “Political reform is not necessary in my country because we are a democracy like any other democracy in the world.”
A day before he made this statement, 65 anti-government activists who had travelled to Zambia to protest on the sidelines of the summit had been refused entry by the Zambian government.
This week Zambia is taking over the chair of the SADC. Other key areas on the agenda at the summit were the creation of a regional standby force and further integration of the 14-member bloc.
Speaking about Zambia’s role in regional efforts to end the crisis in Zimbabwe, Zambia’s information minister Mike Mulongoti told news agencies that “Zambia cannot impose its will on Zimbabwe, just as Zimbabwe cannot impose its will on Zambia. But we can quietly whisper to each other our concerns.”
This is a big climbdown from when Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa compared Zimbabwe with a sinking Titanic following the assaults on Morgan Tsvangirai and other opposition leaders by security forces in March.
Mbeki, who was appointed to lead the regional mediation effort at an extraordinary SADC summit in March, presented his report amid concerns in Zimbabwe that the Pretoria-led effort should be broadened to include other countries in the region.
Thokozani Khupe, deputy president of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said: “The issues on Zimbabwe are so critical that they cannot be put exclusively on the shoulders of President [Thabo] Mbeki. We have confidence in President Mbeki, but we want SADC to involve more than one country.”
Jonathan Moyo, a former Mugabe minister who is now an independent MP and political analyst, concurred: “The mediation should be broadened to include other players in the region so that Zanu-PF can’t wriggle out of the process by saying ‘we can’t have our constitution decided in Pretoria’.”
“You can’t say the mediation is a SADC process when it is entirely led and composed by negotiators from one country,” he said, adding, “Why can’t they meet in Gaborone?”
Asked about the likely outcome of the Lusaka summit, Moyo said: “There are no regional summits that come up with something new.”
Moyo said, since the extraordinary session of March 29, the process has been notable more for its setbacks than its achievements, pointing to the divided opposition and the incidents of no-shows by Zanu-PF negotiators. He said Zanu-PF still does not feel it needs to negotiate, as it is cushioned by a two-thirds majority in Parliament, which allows it to amend the constitution.
However, a source close to the MDC-Zanu-PF talks said that Zimbabweans and the region should be optimistic about the process. “We should wait for the process to run its course before we dismiss it,” he said, expressing confidence that the talks would deliver a “give-and-take constitution” that is acceptable to all the parties involved in the negotiations.
The SADC heads of state met as a document was circulating in the media and in diplomatic circles that painted a fairly rosy picture of the talks and rehashed Mugabe’s well-known refrain that the British government is to blame for Zimbabwe’s troubles. The South African government denied knowledge of the document, adding “If it exists, it was not authored by the government”.
Analysts the Mail & Guardian spoke to wondered if the summit would deliver much, especially in light of the fact that Mugabe received a standing ovation at the packed opening ceremony attended by ministers and other delegates.
Michael Sata, the leader of the Zambian opposition and a fan of the Mugabe government, dismissed the MDC as a “harem of Western agents” who have “descended upon Lusaka during the current SADC summit, in their numbers, to earn breadcrumbs by selling out on their birthright, against Zimbabwe’s national interests”.
Zambia’s founding president Kenneth Kaunda has weighed in on the debate using similar arguments. In a comment piece for the BBC he said Zimbabwe’s negative global image is perpetrated by people “who may not understand what Robert Gabriel Mugabe and his fellow freedom fighters have gone through”.
“Of course, there are some things President Mugabe and his colleagues have done which I totally disagree with — for example, the police beating of Morgan Tsvangirai,” he said.
Tomaz Salomao, executive secretary of SADC, told a news conference that the group had a range of options to deal with the crisis, including a “hard line”, “quiet diplomacy” or a “different” method.
Eldred Masungunure, a political scientist at the University of Zimbabwe, said that most people in Zimbabwe had “exhausted their sense of optimism about the process”. He did not expect the summit to come up with “something spectacular”, arguing that the meeting will likely “come up with more of the same”.
Masungunure said some of the leaders “may garner sufficient courage to chastise Mugabe in private”, but the summit won’t bring about the change that is needed in Zimbabwe. He said the sorry state of affairs is not helped much by the fact that the MDC’s momentum has dissipated because of infighting.