President Thabo Mbeki’s cherished policy of ”quiet diplomacy” on Zimbabwe has been rejected by his own party.
The split between the Union Buildings and Luthuli House on the issue became painfully apparent this week when Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai chose to meet African National Congress (ANC) president Jacob Zuma and secretary general Gwede Mantashe at ANC headquarters in Johannesburg.
After the meeting Zuma said from his homestead in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal, that it was wrong for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to keep the world in suspense about the outcome of the election.
The Mail & Guardian understands that at its last meeting in March, the ANC’s national executive committee debated the quiet diplomacy policy and concluded that it had been ineffective in dealing with the Zimbabwean crisis.
The ANC has told its MPs who took part in the observer mission for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to brief the party on its return.
Previously the group was only accountable to Parliament, where the official report of the 2005 elections was never debated.
ANC treasurer general Mathews Phosa told a gathering of business people in Somerset West outside Cape Town that quiet diplomacy did not work and ”Mugabe was using us”.
Mantashe told the M&G this week that the withholding of the election results by the ZEC is tantamount to a ”coup”.
”To me the proposals on putting together a government of national unity make sense. This is what we as the ANC would like to see happening.”
This is a significant departure from the wait-and-see approach adopted by Mbeki. On Sunday, he told a group of ambassadors and businesspeople in London that the situation in Zimbabwe was ”manageable” and that people should be prepared to ”wait” for the outcome.
A source in the Presidency said, however, that behind the scenes Mbeki is ”mulling over this thing”.
”He sat around waiting for results from Zimbabwe all of last week, which actually made him late for his meetings in London. It has been 12 days now [since the votes were counted]; we are all worried, we don’t know why they are waiting [to release them].”
The source said Mbeki is constrained because ”he is dealing with the president of a country”.
”As mediator you can’t talk too loud, you’re running the risk of upsetting the people involved. You don’t have as many limits when you are the president of a political party. You have more room to manoeuvre and criticise.”
Mantashe said there were no plans to harmonise the policies of the president and the ANC and tackle the Zimbabwe issue jointly. ”The president must do his thing as president of the country and play a role as government; we must have party-to-party relationships. ”
The ANC released a statement on Friday calling for the urgent release of the election results, while the government said the ZEC should explain the delay.
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad appealed to all parties to remain calm, because ”when you lose patience you go to war”.
The ANC has started to feel pressure from its alliance partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party, about the party’s lack of decisive action on South Africa’s northern neighbour.
Cosatu, which met the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) in Johannesburg this week, lambasted Mbeki for his comments on in London about the election.
It said that his ”wait and see” approach was sending a message to Mugabe ”to sit and do whatever to the results”.
Cosatu spokesperson Patrick Craven said the trade-union federation welcomed the shift in the ANC’s perspective. ”It is one of the best features of the post-Polokwane outcome. There is an openness, a willingness to discuss things and a willingness to look at different points of view,” he said.
Craven said quiet diplomacy had a role to play, but that ”because it was quiet, we never knew what was being negotiated”. Cosatu viewed as unfortunate government statements that ”the situation is not as serious as it is being made out to be”.
He added: ”We hope we played some part in influencing the ANC, but the reality of Zimbabwe on the ground probably went further in convincing them that all is not well there. They know now there is reason to doubt that these elections are going to lead to a democratic solution and that the election may well have been stolen.”
Additional reporting by Warren Foster