South Africa

Thuli Manunga, a ten year old who speaks Xhosa at home but is fluent in three languages has become the first black junior pupil to win the prestigious national Afrikanse Taal en Kultuur Vereeneging speaking competition.

In an otherwise perceptive article in The New York Times, Michael Wines seems somewhat nonplussed by the possibility that Thabo Mbeki appears to be entering a lame duck phase as the South African President.

With that status comes more vocal complaints from within the ANC coalition ranks than we may have seen before, especially from the South African Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). And yet COSATU and the SACP should be decidedly unsurprising sources of criticism for anyone with even a modicum of understanding of South African politics.

Africans North-to-South, East-to-West are hyper-wary of foreign encroachments. This should come as no surprise after the dual destabilizing phenomena of western imperialism and the Cold War threw Africa into paroxysms of chaos from which it has not ever fully recovered. So despite (or perhaps because of) the myriad examples of China’s increased chumminess with Africa (which I have written about fairly extensively at this blog), including heightened interest from Chinese entrepeneurs, some Africans are increasingly concerned that this exploding Chinese interest just represents old wine in new skins, neo-colonialism from the east rather than the West.

The Foreign Policy Association has published another of my Great Decisions Analysis pieces. “The Vlok Trial and a Reconciliation With the Truth” looks at the recent criminal proceedings against Adriaan Vlok, South Africa’s Minister of Law and Order in the 1980s, and four other members of the security apparatus for a bizarre attempted murder that involved the attempted poisoning of the underwear of anti-Apartheid cleric Frank Chikane in hopes of killing him with neuro-toxins.

The case involves the intersection of my two main areas of interest in South Africa: the state response to the anti-Apartheid movement in the 1980s and the post-Apartheid push for truth, reconciliation, and justice. Almost literally as the piece was posted, it was announced that Vlok pleaded guilty along with his co-accused. By working out a deal, Vlok was able to avoid jail time, though he did receive a ten-year suspended sentence and one assumes that these may not be the last charges he sees.

(Cross-posted at dcat.)

The African National Congress is dealing with the old Chinese curse of living in interesting times. First there are the natural tensions in a  party such as the ANC that has so many varied constituencies. There is the unseemly but unavoidable Jacob Zuma mess. There is the succession struggle, which really is two succession struggles — for the party leadership and for the presidency — that might result in the ascension of one individual or two. All of this is playing out in what might sometimes appear to be peripheral ways.

Last week Thabo Mbeki forced out his deputy Minister of Health, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, under what many believe to be the fig leaf of an excuse that she attended an AIDS conference in Spain without Mbeki’s knowledge or approval. But making matters more complicated is that Madlala-Routledge has long been a vocal advocate of both a more scientific approach to HIV-AIDS and of more active government interventions in the AIDs crisis that has consumed the country and region. Mbeki’s critics therefore aver that the firing is really a clear sign of Mbeki’s unwillingness to brook dissent within the government and ANC ranks.

Meanwhile, in timing that some see as suspicious,  reports surfaced in the Sunday Times, in a story titled “Manto’s Hospital Booze Binge,” that Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang behaved disgracefully after smuggling booze into Cape Town’s Medi-Clinic hospital when she was there for shoulder surgery two years ago.  Tshabalala-Msimang has demanded a retraction from the paper, which does not appear to be forthcoming.  Mbeki, meanwhile, continues to support his loyal health minister, making the Madlala-Routledge mess stand out all the more.

In a recent article in The Mail & Guardian, Bantu Holomisa, the liberation struggle stalwart and one-time ANC loyalist-turned leader (and MP) of the United Democratic Movement (which he founded with Roelf Meyer)  discusses the ANC’s upcoming national party conference,  argues that the ANC needs to move away from faction fighting:

Between now and December, nonANC members of the public will find it difficult to determine what is going on within the ruling party, because the ANC has been quiet on this matter. The people who have been vocal are the ANC Youth League, Cosatu and the SACP, but to what extent do they control or influence the ANC? Time will tell.

In my experience, the ANC has a culture of leadership selection that is rarely understood. This method is generally attributed to the style of the late OR Tambo. We saw this on display in 1994 when then-president Nelson Mandela thought that Cyril Ramaphosa should have become deputy president of the country. But Mandela was advised differently, and Mbeki was chosen. The advice Mandela was given was that Mbeki was always the heir apparent. This culture of selecting the leader seems to have only been known among the exiles. Madiba and those who were in jail or in the country were apparently caught off guard.

Since 1994 certain sections of the ANC have sought to change the way things are done. And to a degree they have succeeded: the leadership that was in exile has split into separate, feuding factions. In the ANC of old the matter would have been handled in a different manner, out of the public eye. But this is not the same ANC.

Members of the party might have their own opinions about who they want to lead them — and they might want to debate succession openly, precisely because they realise that they are no longer in exile and now have influence over government and government policy. They will expect their leaders to take them into their confidence and be open about the direction of both the party and government. The old culture of the leadership prescribing and the members blindly following has been seriously undermined.

Already there are members of the tripartite alliance who are openly campaigning for another ANC president to replace Mbeki. Names mentioned include Zuma, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Kgalema Motlanthe, Joel Netshithenze, Cyril Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale. Over the next four months there will be much speculation and horse-trading, but at the conference they will be left with one person to lead the ANC.

Depending on how things play out, the post of deputy president could prove crucial. If Mbeki is elected president, the conference will essentially expect him to groom the deputy president to take over as president of the country in 2009. This way the structures that are campaigning for a change in the culture of leadership by annointment will be comfortable. It would be a neat compromise in line with the recent ANC policy conference resolution.

One of his solutions is to decouple the party from the presidency so that the electorate can choose its own president directly. But clearly Holomisa also sees a systemic culture within the ruling party that serves the party and not the people. “The new executive,” he argues, “will have to bring a new sense of leadership, decisiveness and discipline to halt the current slide into lawlessness.”  Holomisa never refers to the recent crisis within Mbeki’s health ministry directly, but one imagines that the ongoing turmoil there only confirms Holomisa’s suspicions.

The heads of state of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)  nations are meeting this week in Lusaka, Zambia. High on the agenda will be the crisis in Zimbabwe, though observers do not expect much on that front. It will be most interesting to see what, if anything, Thabo Mbeki, whom SADC charged with helping mediate the crisis in Zimbabwe, will have to say. I hope to be pleasantly surprised, but I would advise not to expect much traction to come from this week’s meetings.  

Here is a quick survey of Africa-related news stories that have appeared in the last few days:

Sierra Leone’s voters went to the polls this past weekend and  it appears to have gone off with few allegations of improprieties. Hopefully this marks the first small steps in the country’s redemption.

Sam Dealey, Time magazine’s Africa correspondent, argues in the New York Times that it is unwise, problematic and unnecessary to exaggerate death tolls from crises such as Darfur as some activists are wont to do.

Also in the Times we learn that China’s interest in Africa extends to Chad’s oil resources. It can be assumed that anywhere in Africa where there is oil, China’s presence will soon follow.

Do you remember the climactic scene from the Wizard of Oz? Dorothy, Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion are trapped by the Wicked Witch and her Praetorian guard. The Witch taunts Scarecrow with fire, as is her wont, and then sets him alight. Dorothy reacts instinctively, grabbing a handy pail of water from the castle wall and dousing both the scarecrow but also the Wicked Witch with it. The water liquidates the Witch. For a moment it is unclear what the Witch’s henchmen will do, but they announce “All Hail, Dorothy” and give the little girl the Witch’s broom to allow them to fulfill the great and Powerful Wizard’s task for them.

Of course, had the Witch’s personal defense force reacted differently, there would have been nothing left but straw and tin and lionine flesh and the tatters of a teenaged girl’s gingham dress. Dorothy, more than anything, got lucky.

Jeff Jacoby, the arch-conservative columnist of The Boston Globe, apparently never considered this lesson when watching the Wizard of Oz. In a column yesterday, Jacoby presented a well-written, ardent, impassioned, clear argument for either the United States or Great Britain invading Zimbabwe. He also could not be more wrong. 

Jacoby uses Pius Ncube’s recent statements about the prospects of a Zimbabwe invasion as a springboard to justify foreign miliary action (a belief that, as you may recall, Jacoby is not alone in considering, though he may be alone in his blind optimism). And Jacoby believes that such an invasion would be easy:

“Countless lives could be saved, and incalculable suffering ended, if Mugabe were forced from power. A detachment of US Marines, I wrote on this page in 2002, could do the job on its lunch break. The British could do it. South Africa could do it.”

First off, one would think that Jacoby would not be so blithe about the American military’s capacity to overthrow a dictator without any serious difficulties in light of what has gone on in Iraq. As we have seen, the overthrowing is the easy part. What comes next is what becomes a nightmare. Once lunch break is over, then what? How does a US or British (or South African) force then deal with the aftermath, which is sort of the important part? What will the succession struggle look like? Will chopping off the head end all of Zimbabwe’s problems, or will doing so serve as a multiplier effect and simply add to the misery? 

Second, how does such an invasion take place? Zimbabwe is, if Jacoby has not noticed, landlocked. Which African countries allow a foreign troop presence to use their country as a staging ground for military action that might work to remove Mugabe from power but that almost certainly will fuel chaos across the border? And which countries allow the troop presence of either a former colonial power or of a United States that has not exactly acquitted itself well in recent years when it has come to foreign invasions?

Third, the mission matters. Observers (myself included) have long said that a few thousand troops could have prevented the genocide in Rwanda. Similarly, many believe that a similar number of troops could ease the suffering in Darfur. But these would be preventative measures — the troop presence would serve to stop members of paramilitaries from attacking and killing civilians. That is a far cry from forcing regime change, even if regime change is necessary and justified.  

But most significantly, will such a presence get lucky, as Dorothy and her friends did in the castle? Will Mugabe’s military and police, will his private guard, simply accede to the death of their leader? Surely some will. But many won’t. And those that won’t will come from the revolutionary generation, the generation that knows the bush, that has fought in the bush, that has benefitted from Mugabe’s cronyism and kleptocracy, and that will want to have a serious say in what is to follow. Dorothy, remember, got lucky.

This is not to say that the military option should not be on the table. But it is to say that blithe assertions of the ease with which a British or American military effort could solve the crisis should not be taken seriously.  If SADC or the African Union choose to pursue the military option and if they ask the US or UK for support, that is one thing. But to propose such action to derive from Washington or London, Pius Ncube’s frustrated talk notwithstanding, is to live in Oz, a wonderland detached from reality where the roads are golden, the scarecrows talk, and monkeymen fly. It is, in short, to live in a fantasy world.    

Afrifocus has again turned its attention to China’s role in Africa. Worth checking out are a Gareth Evans and  Donald Steinberg article arguing that China’s mindset toward Darfur has changed to the point that “instead of being part of the problem, it could play a significant role in the solution.” If Evans and Steinberg are correct in their assessment, this would provide a pretty good example of why we should never have static conceptions of nation states and their policies.

Also worth checking out is this issue of  Pambazuka News, which is dedicated to the issue of China’s role in Africa, and two Foreign Policy in Focus articles: “China Provokes Debate in Africa” and “China in Africa: It’s (Still) the Governance, Stupid.”

So what do I wake up to this morning, just a few hours after yesterday’s cynical post about Zimbabwe? A report in the Mail & Guardian that Robert Mugabe is nearing a deal that will “end a political crisis in his country.”Naturally, if an agreement, which will largely involve the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)  and Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, is pending that is a good thing. And if it is true, as the M&G story indicates, that the potential truce is the result of Thabo Mbeki’s work as SADC’s chosen broker, all the better.

But let’s not get carried away. Mugabe has spoken of conciliation in the past only to continue on his chosen path whenever he felt it necessary to do so. Mugabe can afford to display largesse. By and large he has won. Giving some concessions to an opposition he has effectively broken is a far cry from Zimbabwe’s crisis being over.

After all, also in this morning’s papers came news that Mugabe’s government is threatening to arrest white farmers resisting evictions from new land targeted for black farmers. Land reform in the former settler colonies of Africa is a vexatious issue. Africans have every right to look for reform policies that will allow blacks, and especially farmers, to secure land on which to work and live. But those policies need to be coherent and, as much as possible, fair and without the threat of violence and coercion. Mugabe’s land reform policies were so long a chimera that only appeared periodically as a threat against white farmers whenever Mugabe felt the need to mobilize his base that when he finally began to enact slapdash policies, they proved to be capricious and chaotic. Whatever the necessity of land reform in Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s policies have proven disastrous and have fueled the economic collapse that has characterized most of the last decade.

Furthermore, whatever the good news coming from Thabo Mbeki’s political mediation, most Zimbabweans are little concerned with politics-qua-politics right now. And so while the M&G  carried that good news forward, it also reminds us that fundamentally, Zimbabwe is an authoritarian state. A new report from the Human Rights Forum argues that torture, assault, unlawful detention and other violations of human rights are increasing apace. 

The HRF report indicates that much of the source for this human rights crisis stems from the political instability, and so perhaps the deal that Mbeki hath wrought will help to stabilize the political situation and in so doing alleviate the human suffering across the country.  Any positive progress is a cause for at least tempered optimism. And if Mbeki’s work really is bearing fruit, it will once again prove the essential role that South Africa must play in the region. But success in Zimbabwe is more than likely going to come in small, incremental, and sometimes barely discernible steps. And even as the country takes those steps, there will be steps backward as well. Indeed, as long as Mugabe is in charge, the question as to whether the shifts in momentum take the country forward or in reverse might be impossible to differentiate.