It’s not quite clear who is held in greater contempt: Robert Mugabe or Thabo Mbeki. In the merciless court of public perception, Mbeki is perhaps almost as guilty as Mugabe for the ongoing crisis in Zimbabwe. The case against Mugabe is straightforward.
There is hardly a news report or piece of punditry that does not blame him for the misery of tens of thousands of his countrymen who line up for bread rations or who daily live in mortal fear of brutality at the hands of agents of the ruling Zanu-PF.
What kind of leader will preside over a country where the weight of the money required for a loaf of bread is heavier than the loaf itself? What kind of a leader will preside over a country where the sick cannot find drugs in hospitals and the healthy cannot find useful work unless they agree to be employed as government thugs? What kind of leader will preside over a country where, daily, an estimated 3 000 of its citizens stream across the borders to the south, fleeing with nothing but the shirts on their backs? What kind of leader will, after 28 years in power, arm thugs to beat voters into line to vote for his continued stay in power? What kind of leader is Robert Mugabe?
After riot police clamped down on trade unionists in April last year, The Punch, a leading Nigerian newspaper, wrote an editorial in which Mugabe was described as belonging to the ”herd of tyrants” produced by a sit-tight syndrome that was becoming widespread on the continent. A lot has changed — for the worse — since that editorial.
After the government fiddled with the results of the March elections and arranged a re-run boycotted by the opposition, I asked a Lagos-based school teacher, Waheed Adebayo, what he thought of the situation in Zimbabwe. ”What I think?” he retorted. ”I think that Mugabe should be tied to the back of a truck and dragged through the streets of Harare. He is overdue to step down but won’t go quietly — for his own good or for that of his country.”
What has this got to do with Mbeki? There is a common feeling that Zimbabwe is past redeeming by internal effort. It’s a familiar road for many Nigerians. During Sani Abacha’s five-year rule, the country was brought to its knees and the opposition hunted down. The weary people had to look outside, to the Pope, the Commonwealth (especially South Africa and Britain), or the United States — wherever help was to be found. Not that they expected outsiders to remove the dictator and fix their country for them, but they hoped that every voice of reason, every chastisement would carry some weight and help to abridge their suffering.
It is precisely in this context that concerns are being expressed about Mbeki’s ”quiet diplomacy” in Zimbabwe. What kind of diplomacy refuses to acknowledge that there is a crisis in a country that is on the brink of a war or that insists that Zimbabwe can sort itself out without help from outside? For how long will he babysit Mugabe?
On two major occasions Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy has let him down badly. The first occasion was well documented by Mark Gevisser in his book, The Dream Deferred. Mbeki was in Nigeria during Abacha’s reign of terror. He was the deputy president then but he was effectively in charge of the foreign ministry. Whereas much of the decent world condemned Abacha’s misrule and spoke up against his plan to hang Ken Saro-Wiwa, Mbeki opted for ”quiet diplomacy,” forcing the Nigerian Noble prize winner, Wole Soyinka, to say this was ”for the very ironic reason that they feel that they owe Nigeria a debt of gratitude for its stand against apartheid. But how can they be so naïve as to not recognise the fact that their debt of gratitude is to the people and not to a government which is oppressing those very people?” By the time South Africa spoke out, it was too late — Abacha had hanged Saro-Wiwa.
Quiet diplomacy failed again in Angola, where Mbeki had taken the position that only negotiations with Jonas Savimbi could guarantee peace for the country. Well, Savimbi was killed in a battle in 2002 and the rebel insurgency disappeared with his death.
Mbeki may respond that if there has been a failure of diplomacy in Zimbabwe, the blame does not lie with him but with Britain, which created the problem in the first place by reneging on its commitment to fund the land distribution policy in defence of Harold Wilson’s ”kith and kin” policy.
What’s more, his soft approach had endeared him to Mugabe at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, putting Zimbabwe’s resources at the disposal of ANC’s military wing. Also, Mugabe suspended his land redistribution policy in the early 1990s to save South Africa from panic on the eve of its independence. Mbeki does not understand why he should repay that good turn with a violent recompense. I sympathise with him, but the future of Zimbabwe is greater than his debt to one man.
Under different circumstances, a Nigerian leader would probably be under as much pressure as he is facing to bring an end to the crisis in Zimbabwe. But the sham elections that brought Umaru Yar’Adua to power in April 2007 has not only reduced his moral authority, it has dented the credentials of his predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo, on whose watch Mugabe was forced to withdraw Zimbabwe’s membership of the Commonwealth.
At a time when the continent is in dire need of leadership, Nigeria’s voice has been reduced to a mere whimper, with its call on the Zimbabwean government on the eve of the re-run elections for further negotiations buried inside the newspapers.
The ball is squarely in Mbeki’s court, not just because the crisis is right in his backyard, but because he owes it to the common humanity of millions of suffering Zimbabweans to make his voice be heard.
Mbeki and Mugabe have come a long way but, as Soyinka said in the days of Abacha, South Africa’s debt of gratitude is not to the government but to the very people that the government is oppressing.