/ 13 April 2008

Piercing the Mbeki shield

On the surface, South Africa’s assumption of the presidency of the United Nations Security Council earlier this month has no relevance for the Zimbabwe electoral crisis. Desperate Zimbabweans could call for help from the UN, but this call comes when South Africa is gatekeeper at the Security Council. Pretoria has said in the past that it does not believe Zimbabwe is an agenda item for the UN.

President Thabo Mbeki has carved himself a role in which he asks the rest of the world to leave Zimbabwe to itself — or in his hands. In the wake of his meetings with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Mbeki has said Zimbabwe is “manageable”.

This is his verdict on a situation where presidential election results already known at polling stations could not be released by the National Command Centre for more than a tense week; a clear popular vote against Robert Mugabe is being reversed; opposition offices have been raided; farm invasions once again staged; journalists arrested. A situation where police and electoral officers languish in custody for asking why opposition votes were being undercounted is … manageable. And the world should do nothing about it.

In the past eight years Pretoria has helped sustain the dictatorship in Harare in a number of ways, including voting at the UN Human Rights Council and its predecessor to block discussion on human rights in Zimbabwe; seeking to block the expulsion of Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth; certifying fraudulent elections in Zimbabwe as “legitimate” and thus providing Mugabe with much-needed political oxygen in his battle for electoral legitimacy; allowing parastatal bad debt on electricity supplies to Zimbabwe, even as South Africans experience power cuts; soft-landing the effect on Harare of international policy sanctions; and framing the Zimbabwe problem in terms so nebulous as to obfuscate any meaningful diplomatic action at the African or global level.

Misconstruing his position as an advancement of African political self-reliance, Mbeki has consistently gone against African opinion that rejects Mugabe’s humiliation of his own people behind a smokescreen of Africanist rhetoric. Nelson Mandela, presidents Jakaya Kikwete and John Kufuor and former UN chief Kofi Annan are just a few of the leading Africans who realise that Mugabe does not represent the future that Africa seeks for itself. So are various civil society organisations, as well as the Southern Africa Development Community’s parliamentarians.

In the past two weeks Mugabe has finally removed the patina of democratic pretence. His boot is firmly on the neck of his people. Zimbab­weans cannot bear Mbeki saying the situation is “manageable”. The pretence that Mbeki understands his responsibility to protect defenceless Zimbabweans is now dangerous: possible other contributions to resolving the crisis could continue to be fenced out.

African and international leaders should demand that Mugabe respect the will of the voters and that the rule of law be restored in Zimbabwe. Mbeki should join these leaders in calling for a genuine return to legitimacy in Zimbabwe through the creation of human rights and democratic conditions such as Mbeki would expect in his own country.

This is to ask nothing more than that, in a manner of speaking, Mbeki reads aloud the Constitution of South Africa while sitting next to Mugabe.

Tawanda Mutasah is executive director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa