South Africa

Kenyans went to the polls yesterday to vote in an election in which the battle is both metaphorical – the election has and is going to continue to be closely fought – and literal, as fears of violence pervaded the day yesterday and will hover over the country until and maybe even after the results are known.  Exit polls conflict over who leads the presidential tally, incumbent Mwai Kibaki or his challenger Raila Odinga. What appears clear, however, is that a number of incumbents, including Vice President Hon Moody Awori and several ministers, are likely to lose their seats in parliament.  If Odinga does win, and if peace and stability hold, the Kenyan elections will mark a crucial moment in contemporary African history and democracy.

Tomorrow Kenyans go to the polls. In what is becoming an increasingly intense campaign (in what has almost certainly been the most open election in Kenya’s history) it appears that the opposition, led by 62-year-old Raila Odinga — a  businessman and former political prisoner, is pulling ahead of President Mwai Kibaki, who has held office since 2002, and may well win. Both men are vital figures in the history of post-independence Kenya, and Africa observers are watching closely, even as evidence of strong-armed machinations emerge, to see if the election goes smoothly, and if the loser and his supporters go down without fomenting violence. Certainly it appears that a new, more sophisticated, money-driven politics has emerged in Kenya. It remains to be seen if this has a deleterious effect on the country’s political culture.

There is a subtext to this election, and to the political situation in Kenya generally, which is that as with much of the region, Islam is playing an increasing role in politics. Not problematic in and of itself, the rise of Islam nonetheless has seen accompany it strains of radical Islam, which does warrant scrutiny. Thus the west, and especially the United States, will likely be paying increasing attention to events in Kenya and elsewhere.

The problem is that when the United States and the rest of the West intervenes in Africa out of self interest African interests almost always fall by the wayside. This is yet another reason why many of us wish the United States would develop a comprehensive policy toward Africa, and not one based merely on self-interest, temporal concerns, piecemeal approaches, and half-baked understandings. That is unlikely to happen, of course, and so one can imagine sloppy, divisive, detrimental US policy emerging in response to the perceived threat of Islam in Africa that will inevitably do more harm than good and that will do little to address legitimate dangers of radicalism.

I want to wish each of you peace, prosperity, and joy during this holiday season. Geseende Kersfees! Sinifisela Ukhisimusi Omuhle! Ikresimesi emnandi! 

South Africa is a sport-mad society and 2007 was a year to fuel the country’s passions. The Proteas’ participation in the cricket World Cup and the run-up to South Africa’s hosting the 2010 World Cup would ordinarily have been the stories of the year, but by winning the Rugby World Cup the Springboks became the biggest story in South Africa’ s sporting scene in 2007 and one of the biggest stories period.

 IOL has a number of yearly wrap-up stories on rugby, including here, here, here, here, here, and here.

And for some of the year’s most memorable international sports quotations, see here.

Finally, as with just about every other facet of South African life, sports and politics often merge. The Mail & Guardian ran an interview this week with Sport and Recreation Minister Makhenkesi Stofile about the new Sports Amendment Act, which allows the government to intervene in matters related to sports, and about transformation in sport in general.
 

John Carlin, former South Africa correspondent for the London Independent attended the ANC’s Polokwane conference for South Africa’s Independent Newspapers. In a column in that capacity, Carlin brings up a recent article on Zuma in London’s Daily Mail. Carlin properly castigates the Daily Mail’s predictably retrograde tone:

The Daily Mail is a vibrantly successful London newspaper that makes its money from nourishing the vulgar appetites and narrow prejudices of Middle England.

This week it published an article about Jacob Zuma that began with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink redramatisation of the before, during and after of the famous shower scene; went on to make some jokes about all the wives and all the children, and generally portrayed the new ANC president as a machinegun-wielding, communist, Zulu warrior who would expropriate white farms and - horrors - set a-tremble the 220 000 British citizens who have bought second homes in South Africa.

Simplistic though well-enough-written crap, the story (headline: “Machinegun man takes over ANC God help the Rainbow Nation”) does Mail readers the service of confirming their dumb conviction that Africa is an irredeemably barbaric place and gives them a jolly good chuckle into the bargain.

And yet, Carlin notes:

Such tomfoolery could be brushed aside easily enough were it not for the fact that it offers an insight however caricaturishly extreme into a real and very serious problem that South Africa is going to have to confront, and soon, in terms of the way it is perceived in the rest of the world in these outrageously globalised, interdependent times.

Even a bind squirrel is lucky enough to stumble on an acorn now and then, and in the midst of perpetuating his newspaper’s blinkered views of Africa, Andrew Malone appears to have so stumbled. But it is alarming, though hardly surprising, that such views prevail even in London to the point where depicting Africa in such Dark Continent terms continues to have currency.

Carlin’s article, which starts with so much promise, somewhat sputters to an end. His ultimate conclusion is that Thabo Mbeki, in order to firm up South Africa’s standing in the world, “should take advantage of these turbulent political times finally to fire the health minister [Manto Tshabalala-Msimang] and the commissioner of police [Jackie Selebi].” Execrable as the performances of these two have been, and as salutary as firing them might be, as a climax for the column, his proposed solution doesn’t quite jibe. Yes, firing Tshabalala-Msimang and Jackie Selebi is overdue. But one would think that Carlin would have a larger vision for South Africa to present to counter the vacuous puffery of the Andrew malones of the world. As it stands, Carlin’s solutions fall into the category of necessary but not sufficient proposals.

Robert I. Rotberg, director of Harvard’s Kennedy School Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution and World Peace Foundation president, has an op-ed piece in today’s Boston Globe in which he praises those world leaders who have stood up against Robert Mugabe, most notably Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel Great British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He concludes:

Zimbabwe’s long, dark night of despair will not soon end unless Washington, London, and Brussels join forces to put massive private pressure on Mbeki. He and Jacob Zuma, his likely successor as South African president, hold the future of the remaining hungry, dispossessed, and afflicted of Zimbabwe in their so far temporizing hands.

Rotberg is certainly on to something, although his prescription, which includes his belief that South Africa must help “ease [Mugabe] out through jawboning, effective diplomacy, or the exercise of persuasive force,” embodies the vagueness that characterizes most of the criticism of South Africa’s approach to Zimbabwe. Rotberg is rather unclear as to what he means by “jawboning” or “effective diplomacy” (as opposed, I imagine, to a plan of ineffective diplomacy?) or “the exercise of persuasive force.”  

The Mail & Guardian has issued its annual end-of-year grades for South Africa’s Cabinet Ministers. Find Part I here and Part II here.

After months of speculation and prognostication and forecasting about what would transpire at Polokwane, over who would win and what would result, over the state of the ANC, South Africa has now entered a new phase in its political development. Jacob Zuma’s decisive victory over Thabo Mbeki, his ascension to the top post of the African National Congress, now appears to have created the conditions for months of speculation and prognostication and forecasting about what will transpire until the 2009 elections, over who will win in the future and what will result, over the state of the ANC.

Even as Zuma tries to calm fears over the corruption charges he likely faces in the coming weeks and months he also has to reassure the rest of the world that he is not about to embark on a punitive purging of the ANC. That is not to say that as a result of events in Polokwane there won’t be a shake-up of the ANC hierarchy. But the question, which Williams Gumede, respected observer of South African Politics and author of the book Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC,  addresses in The Guardian, is whether or not the Zuma triumph will result in a break-up of the ANC.  Gumede sounds a largely optimistic note:

For all its shortcomings, the process completed yesterday has been ultimately constructive. The achilles heel of most African liberation movements has been their failure to have competitive elections, either out of fear of division, or deference to the sitting leader. Importantly, both these stifling taboos have now been broken in the ANC. The election has been insufficient and stifled, but even the limited democratic space it has opened is a step forward. Zuma will almost certainly face tougher scrutiny and more urgent demands to deliver. And, critically, a precedent has been set: grassroots members can vote out unresponsive leaders. 

2008 should be fascinating. 

South Africa is far from the only country in Africa focused on electoral politics. Kenya faces a huge moment in its history when its people go to the polls on December 27. Pambazuka News has some of the best coverage of the Kenyan situation, including a lengthy and impassioned analysis from the novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.

Well, that didn’t take long, did it? The African National Conference delegates who had gathered in Polokwane were barely settled back into their posh suburban homes near Cape Town and Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban, Port Elizabeth  and Pietermaritzberg and all points in between when the news came across the wires. The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has decided that there is enough evidence to pursue corruption charges against their new ANC president, Jacob Zuma.  

So what does this mean? Well, it certainly means that the NPA has a peculiar sense of timing. Seeing how it is difficult to believe that new evidence has emerged in the last few days, or even weeks, why now? Why did this not happen weeks ago? Why not on the eve of the Polokwane meeting? Or why not until after the new year?

And the question lingering as a subtext to all of this is what role did Thabo Mbeki have, if any in all of these machinations? The historical adjective most applied to Mbeki is “Machiavellian.” Is this an example of Mbeki’s Machiavellian nature? What about Zuma? Has he accumulated enough power to have been able to manipulate the system to forestall charges until after his election as party presidency? To bring the charges early enough that he can beat them (assuming he can beat them — far from a foregone conclusion) early enough to allow him to recover for the national election that he surely sees as being in his pocket in 2009?

And what of the popular response? Among his most ardent followers the charges will almost surely appear to be a plot from the Mbeki faction and further evidence that their man is not only a hero, but also a martyr. In an odd way, these charges may well bolster Zuma’s populist bona fides even as they confirm his own Machiavellian streak among his opponents. But surely the charges will also arouse worry, maybe even shame, among some rank and file members of the still-divided ANC.

On more than one occasion I have tried to temper the importance of Polokwane by noting that with a long time to go before the 2009 elections there was lot of political football to be played. The possibility that the NPA would bring charges always ranked high among the potential tectonic shifts. Who suspected that the plates would crumple so soon after Zuma’s ascension to the party’s top post? So much for Zuma’s hoped-for new era of good feelings in ANC politics.