South Africa

Thabo Mbeki recently wrote in ANC Today about the links between the role that crime plays in the country’s psyche and the still percolating racism that simmers beneath the surface of the ociety.  The country’s whites too often ignore the connection. Money excerpt:

“For this section of our population … every reported incident of crime communicates the frightening and expected message that the kaffirs are coming. Entrenched racism dictated that “justification must be found for the persisting white fears of ‘die swart gevaar’. All incidents of crime, preferably broadcast as loudly as possible, provide such justification.”**

 There is some merit to Mbeki’s remarks. There is a large segment of the white population that is almost gleeful about crime and that will use it as an excuse for lambasting the ANC. Crime is a function of poverty and lawlessness, and poverty and lawlessness were defining characteristics of the apartheid state.

 That said, Mbeki needs to be wary of the demagogic tendency to close off all criticism by tossing off accusations of racism against those critics. It is a fine line and is not an easy one to tread but for the sake of the South African political climate, this is an arrow that needs to remain in his quiver most of the time. It will be most lethal if used least frequently. 

**Swaart gevaar is an Afrikaans phrase meaning “black danger” or “black peril” and that refers to the age-old white fear of the black masses. And kaffir is the ultimate South African racial epithet, the country’s toxic ”N Word.”   

Cape Town mayor Hellen Zille has announced that she will be running for the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) national leadership title, which will then put her in place to be the DA’s candidate for the presidency. Zille hopes to replace Tony Leon, who announced last year that he would not seek another term as party leader. Zille will continue to fulfill her mayoral duties.

Zille also commented on the role of the ANC, and on her hopes that the DA can help to forge the country’s future alongside the moderate forces of the ANC. She sees such an alliance as forestalling the ascendence of the country’s “far left,” especially if the ANC splits.

This strikes me as a wise strategy. The DA depicts itself as a party “vir all die mense” (”for all the people”), and yet the reality is that a predominantly white political party is not going to provide a viable alternative to the ANC. But if the DA can promote an alliance with the ANC if and when the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) split from the ANC, it might just have a future as something more than an asterisk in national politics.

The situation in Zimbabwe is intensifying following a firebomb attack against the Marimba police camp  in Harare by suspected opposition activists, most likely from the Movement for Democratic Change. The descent into violent response was probably inevitable. Even the most rightoeus opposition movement will only be able to resist through the political system for so long when the leaders of the country are insistent upon crushing dissent of any kind. It was this situation that the ANC faced when they finally took up armed struggle in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre.

The political reality does not necessarily justify violence, but the police represent an arm of the state — not a civilian population, so let’s forswear any accusations of terrorism — and at a certain point, this sort of response became increasingly likely. The problem with the attack is not a moral one, but rather it is tactical. Such violence in the absence of an organized struggle is not going to have any positive effect, and in all likelihood will lead to Mugabe declaring a state of emergency. His government has already asserted that it will crush opposition, and it will use violence as the excuse to do so. According to a statement issued by Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, “Those who incite violence, or actually cause and participate in unleashing it, are set to pay a very heavy price, regardless of who they are.” Mugabe now has his excuse to unleash the dogs against all opposition, not just those who use violence, but that violence will provide Mugabe all the cover that he needs.

Nonetheless, it is a good sign that an increasing number of African leaders are losing patience with Mugabe’ and his ruthless regime. For a long time Mugabe has hidden behind his status as a liberation hero and has cynically manipulated the Pan African ideal and the resentments over the colonial legacy to dissuade and condemn criticism of him. African leaders are loath to criticize one another because of the shared experience of an utter lack of sovereignty under the imperial powers. While this makes sense, as a certain point some issues trump sovereignty. Among these surely are the very sorts of human rights violations that so characterized imperialism (and settler colonies such as South Africa, Kenya, and Nothern and Southern Rhodesia, the latter of which became Zimbabwe after Mugabe anbd others helped win independence).

Hopefully the increased response from the rest of the continent (and from countries such as New Zealand and Australia) will also force Thabo Mbeki to rethink his failed policy of “silent diplomacy.” In the meantime, expect more, not less, chaos to emanate from Zimbabwe with the State of Emergency that will provide Mugabe the excuse to crush any opposition almost assured.

The cricket World Cup is underway. Among the African entrants: Kenya won its first match against Canada by seven wickets. Zimbabwe will face Ireland later today. South Africa will start things off against the Netherlands in a match they should win handily. The Proteas are one of the favorites, so most South African fans are torn between bombastic nationalistic pride and a sense of impending doom. You can find full coverage here.

The news on AIDS from Africa is rarely good, and southern Africa usually offers the grimmest tidings. Nonetheless, the feedback from what is being billed as “the most representative HIV/AIDS meeting ever held in” South Africa hints that perhaps things will improve. The meeting,  opened in Pretoria today, and will debate the new HIV/AIDS national strategic plan for 2007-2011, which the AIDS Law Project’s Mark Heywood hails as “one of the most far-sighted strategic plans on the globe at the moment.” Plans, however celebrated, are one thing, follow-up another, but surely these developments mark a significant step forward in the one region of the world that cannot afford anything else.

One of the major reasons why this blog, putatively devoted to South Africa, has so emphasized Zimbabwe thus far is that beyond the obvious significance of Zim right now, the country also represents South Africa’s biggest foreign policy challenge. It is too facile to assert that South Africa is doing nothing as so many obeservers have in recent years. But it is also true that Thabo Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy has been both too quiet and too diplomatic.

One wonders if the news  out of Zimbabwe in recent days will push Mbeki into a more aggressive stand. Mugabe’s most vocal opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, who leads one of two factions of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was arrested along with other individuals after a rally this past weekend. It appears clear that Tsvangirai has been tortured or at least brutally beaten, and although a court order has been issued demanding that Tsvangirai and the others be given urgent medical treatment and access to lawyers, so far Mugabe’s police have defied the court.  (For more coverage see here — be sure to check out the links at the end of the article as well.)

Mbeki’s lack of obvious action with regard to events across the Limpopo is in its way understandable and yet ultimately feckless. It is understandable because Mugabe still stands as something of a liberation hero in the region and he provided tremendous aid to the South African struggle against apartheid in the 1980s. But at a certain point loyalty can be misplaced. Mbeki’s fecklessness in avoiding confrontation with the ANC’s old ally has the appearance of wilfull blindness in which Mbeki overlooks the very sorts of atrocities against Africans that the anti-colonial struggles fought so hard to overcome.

If for no reason other than self interest one would think that Mbeki would take a harder line against Mugabe. Presumably South Africa will want to be able to have some role in helping to rebuild a New Zimbabwe when it finally emerges. But by coddling, or at least appearing not to want to challenge Mugabe publicly, South Africa is abdicating its role, its opportunity, as a regional power. It is also sacrificing its credibility among masses of Zimbabweans.

“Silent diplomacy” has failed, however sensible and even noble the discrete approach must have seemed to those in the position to shape its contours. It is time for the ANC, with Thabo Mbeki in the lead, to say “no more” and to show that it means business in doing so. South Africa is the most powerful nation in the region. Given the fact that the EU and UN have condemned the latest behavior of Mugabe’s henchmen and that the rest of the world largely seems to be following suit, Mbeki has both the means and the opportunity to act and in so doing to prove South Africa’s status across the continent. The only question that remains, then, is whether he has the will to do so.

The International Crisis Group has posited a possible solution to the Zimbabwe stalemate. Their outline has garnered the general support in principle of both factions of the divided Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Zimbabwe’s major opposition party, as well as members of President Robert Mugabe’s own Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) whose dissatisfaction with the status quo is growing. The plan calls for the retirement of President Robert Mugabe, a power-sharing transitional government, a new constitution, and elections.

 This all sounds great. Mugabe retires, opening the political field for free and fair elections in which all parties will be guaranteed a place at the table. The new government will operate under a new constitution. The rivers will flow with honey, the lakes fill with beer, and the land will once again become Africa’s breadbasket. The Zim soccer team will win the World Cup in South Africa in 2010 and lions and zebras will frolic together on the veld.

 In other words, let us not get ahead of ourselves. The prospects that Mugabe’s retirement will mean the end of, to coin a term, “Mugabeism” within ZANU-PF seems unlikely. The idea that he would retire without putting in place a successor seems dubious. Even if that successor fails to take his place, surely he or she will hold onto enough support within the new dispensation, and as important among the former revolutionaries who still wield power through force of guns in the countryside, to make a smooth transition dubious.  I’ve been arguing for a little while now that the opportunity for change is nigh. But I find the ICG report to be naive despite its detached and official tone. Mugabe tends not to adhere to the will of international organizations seeking his ouster.

This is not to propose embracing cynicism and certainly not to wish for the proposed plan to go awry. But the first step in dealing with Big Men is to be prepared for what they are capable of and not what we might hope for them to do.  Or, to invoke (and clean up) a common riddle one of my old high school football coaches used to present when our desires and reality clashed, wish in one hand and spit in the other, and guess which one fills up faster? 

The ICG report represents another sign that winds of hope blow across Zimbabwe. But that hope has not yet translated into a mandate for change.   

Over the course of an interview in the Mail & Guardian Zwelinzima Vavi, the secretary general of the Congress of South African Trade Unions asserted that his organization wants to re-establish itself as a more powerful player within the African National Congress’ tripartite alliance of COSATU, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the ANC itself. As to whether COSATU will separate itself from the ANC, at least for now, that does not seem to be on the table. vavi argues:

The ANC is a force of the left and my personal opinion is that it would be a mistake for the left to try and create their own new party. The ANC is the primary force; let’s fix it. There is no guarantee that a new left force will act any differently from the ANC. All left political parties that get into government are always shifting to the right, because in government the demands and realities that you have to deal with are different.

I have long argued that the most viable path to an alternative to the ANC would come from a fracturing of the tripartite alliance, with COSATU and the ANC stepping out and forming their own left wing party. In June 2006, for example, I wrote:

I have said it for years. The dominance of the African National Congress will not wane as the result of a challenge from the right. The days of the National Party and its inconsequential successors is past. There is room and a need for true conservatism (which I will then heartily oppose) in South Africa, but it cannot rise from the ashes of the Afrikaner Broederbond, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) or the Nats, new, old, gereformeerde or otherwise. The challenge, then, will come from the left. More accurately it will come as the result of a break in the tripartite alliance that makes up the ANC — the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). I am certainly not an original thinker on this point, but these are observations I have been making since 1997 so I feel some sense that my construction of the discussion, at least, is my own.

The reason one can envision such a break is because recently both COSATU and the SACP have been making noise indicating that they could, possibly, at some point, consider breaking fron the alliance and going forward on their own in the political waters. That it has taken this long, and that it might never come to pass, is testament to the hold that power has on any constituency that has it. Being in the ANC fold is a virtual guarantee of access, status, and viability — of, in essence, the concrete benefits of being in the catbird seat. COSATU and the SACP have always been second among equals, however, and this has long chafed the leadership of these organizations that, rightly, remind us of their vital role in the long liberation struggle. [. . .]

The SACP is antsy to push a socialist agenda. It is an agenda that, while it has some fruitful points, would, if implemented in toto, be an utter disaster in the one country that Africans across the continent simply cannot afford to go awry. COSATU rightly emphasizes the rights of workers, but like all unions is largely unconcerned with masses who live on the agricultural fringes and with those not within its ranks, which is to say, a majority of South Africans, a point that COSATU elides because to do otherwise would raise some uncomfortable questions.

South Africa has a parliamentary legislature that the ANC has dominated since 1994. I surmise that even after a break of the alliance the ANC will continue to do so. But its support levels will surely drop to or below where they were after the 1994 elections when the Nats and Inkatha Freedom Party, the one defunct the other irrelevant, drew support. This is to my mind a good thing. The ANC with too much support, which translates to too much power, frightens me. I’d like to think that South Africa is different from other African states, its leaders more sage, its democracy more stable, its juduciary and military more independent. But power is power, and when too much of it is consolodated for too long, such power becomes dangerous. Such a break would be especially good if it could be amicable — if COSATU and SACP can maintain an alliance on a large number of issues while pursuing their own course where there is divergence.

This is all by way of description — what I see happening — rather than prediction, though I have long held that in the long run the alliance would be untenable if the partners ultimately chose to care about more than simply maintaining their grip on the levers of control. It is a dynamic well worth watching in the weeks, months and years to come.

Despite Vavi’s assertions, an eventual break seems the most likely path to a viable national opposition party. It has long been clear that COSATU in particular is both unhappy with the current state of the relationship and wants serious systemic change. self-interest will only keep COSATU in the fold for so long if the organization firmly believes that a change is necessary. In the long run, the internal dynamics of this longstanding alliance will have a significant impact on the future of South African politics.

At The Mail & Guardian Virginia Tilley, a chief research specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council, speculates about Africa’s, and especially South Africa’s, role in a potential war against Iran and in the “War on Terror” generally. Her conclusions are probably not what the Bush administration would want to hear:

Renewed crisis in Somalia and the coming showdown with Iran suggest that the Bush administration’s agenda offers little but mounting expense and new dangers for African security. The urgent question for South Africa is not how to join that war, but how to help protect Africa from it.

Of course South Africa needs to walk a tightrope. On the one hand the South Africans want American support. At the same time the South Africans are not likely to go in for being a puppet for Bush administration policies. Most likely Thabo Mbeki cannot wait for the 2008 elections and the prospects of change in the American leadership.

Swanee Hunt, director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and chairwoman of The Initiative for Inclusive Security, published an op-ed piece in today’s  <i>Boston Globe</i> praising the progress Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, “Ma Ellen,” has made in Liberia in her first year as that country’s president:

Despite 14 years of civil war, Johnson-Sirleaf demonstrated that she is capable of leading Liberia into new possibilities. Her government embraces minorities and opposition members. She has initiated sweeping anti corruption reforms as well as initiatives to resettle and reintegrate tens of thousands of refugees and ex-combatants. Sanctions on timber have been lifted. Her administration has begun training new security forces, restored electricity and water to parts of the capital, substantially increased primary school enrollment, and begun to rebuild roads. She has increased government revenues by more than 40 percent; and not only is foreign aid streaming in, there’s even a growing trickle of foreign investment.

For more on Liberia, go here.