South Africa

Let’s forget, if at all possible, the power outages, political debates, Robert Mugabe’s destabilizing jackassery, and all of the other mundane grimness that afflicts South African public life these days. For the world of sport provides two of the saddest stories of all. The first is the fact that Bafana Bafana appears set to bow out of the African Nations Cup with barely a peep barring some sort of freak miracle involving St. Jude smiling upon their boots (and frowning upon some others). It seems like a long way from the rarefied air South African football seemed to occupy in the period from 1996 to 1998 or so.  If the possibility of a flameout from the country’s footballers isn’t enough to arouse paroxysms of frustration (and drinking) then the impending retirement of Protea Shaun Pollack will push most fans of South Africa’s sporting scene over the edge.

For a couple of weeks it looked as if Kenyans has stepped back from the brink and that the worst was over. But such an assessment appears premature. Violence has escalated in recent days. On Tuesday a mob dragged Melitus Mugabe Were from his car and shot him dead. Were was a new member of Kenya’s parliament and many believed that he held out the promising of helping to bridge some of the country’s divides. Instead, mediation appears to have butted up against hard political and social realities, and some observers  see a country on the brink of collapse. Jendayi Frazer, the United States’ top envoy to Africa, believes that ethnic cleansing may be underway in Kenya, and worries about the consequences of the Kenya crisis for regional stability.

Meanwhile at The New Republic, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, who is not a specialist in African issues, argues that colonialism is not to blame for events in Kenya, under the apparent dual misconceptions  that anyone is positing such a reductionist monocausal explanation or that colonialism is not a factor among many in understanding Kenya’s, indeed Africa’s, contemporary straits. I’d simply refer Llosa (and everyone else) again to  Caroline Elkins’ fine recent piece on the historical antecedents to Kenya’s current crises and remind Llosa and all other observers that it is probably not all that useful to create straw persons for the sole purpose of heroically destroying them.

It almost certainly comes as a shock to absolutely no one that Robert Mugabe has acted in bad faith and announced unilaterally (even as he has been in the midst of negotiations with the factions of the Movement for Democratic Change) that elections will be held on March 2. Now the MDC is scrambling to figure out what to do. Their options are circumscribed: The opposition can choose to boycott the elections, guaranteeing another Mugabe victory, which the wily tyrant will depict as a mandate, or to participate in elections that are pretty certain to be a sham, in which Mugabe secures victory, thus claiming a mandate. This frustrating hobson’s choice encapsulates the frustration of politics in Robert Mugabe’s brutocracy.

Stephanie Hanson, news editor for the Council on Foreign Relations, recently interviewed Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC’s most visible leader. Tsvangirai gives thoughtful answers to questions on a host of issues, though at time the hopelessness of the opposition’s plight seems almost tangible in his words. He expressed his wish for the world’s response to the situation in Zimbabwe:  “The elections that are forthcoming in Zimbabwe must be raised to the same level like Darfur. There must be an international outcry.” But what has the west’s supposed outcry (which frankly seems rather muted and is by any measure ineffectual) accomplished in Darfur? About as much as it has in Zimbabwe.

Tyrants only know one language, and that is the universal lingua franca of power. Power does not have to mean force, though force is never far from power. Until Mugabe is forced to change, to relent, or to cede control, he will do none of those things. The same can be said for Omar al-Bashir and the thugs he empowers in Darfur. Hand wringing is not enough. It never is.

This weekend’s New York Times travel section featured Cape Town in it’s “36 Hours In . . .” feature. I’ve no idea why anyone traveling to Cape Town would spend so little time there.

One can quibble with some of writer Michael Wines’ choices. And his perplexing analogy at the beginning of the piece. (”Cape Town is South Africa’s Los Angeles to Johannesburg’s New York) is crazy on so many levels it boggles the imagination. (Joburg as New York? Cape Town as the vapid, self-indulgent landscape of LA? It makes me wonder which Wines understands less, the US or South Africa.)  Still, it is nice to see the United States’ “paper of record” feature Cape Town in this way and to be reminded of some of my own past trips to one of my favorite cities on earth. 

The Cape Argus on January 23, 2008, republished my latest Foreign Policy Association think piece under the title “Signs of a Magnificent Catastrophe.” (Pdf file) The piece appears smack-dab in the middle of the page. You can also track down a copy of Wednesday’s editions as well.

The blackouts plaguing South Africa seem to be getting worse. The finger pointing is getting more intense as most everyone tries to apportion or shed blame. And now Business Report wonders if the recent woes in power delivery don’t augur poorly for South Africans when the country hosts the 2010 World Cup.

There seem to be several questions implicit in the Business Report article. One is about simple delivery of services. But forget about 2010. South Africans need power now. When I lived in Grahamstown, power outages were not unheard of, but they happened and could be endlessly frustrating. The idea of consistent, long, unpredictable outages roiling across the country should be almost unfathomable, and yet that is where South Africa is right now. Forget about 2010. South Africans need to know that they will have access to electricity in February 2008.

Another obvious concern is simply with South Africa’s ability to carry out the World Cup. I believe that the country will find a way to do so and to do so well. But the third question becomes: At what cost to South Africans? 20120 needs to be a way to showcase South Africa while at the same time improving infrastructure, contributing to the economy, and providing avenues for growth. If the government and planners have to rob peter to pay Paul, 2010 will no longer look quite so good.

Sasha Chanoff, cofounder and executive director of the humanitarian organization Mapendo International, recently wrote an essential op-ed piece for The Boston Globe debunking the myth of “tribal violence” in Kenya (and elsewhere). Here is the money excerpt:

FROM READING recent headlines about Kenya, one would think that the post-election violence is the result of tribal hatreds. But this assessment is wrong.

“Tribal violence spirals in Kenya,” “tribal war,” “tribal bloodletting” announced headlines around the world. A recent New York Times article said the mayhem in Kenya is a result of the “atavistic vein of tribal tension that . . . until now had not provoked widespread mayhem.”

This is a facile explanation of Kenya’s post-election violence. Yes, some people from different tribes are attacking one another. It’s ugly and scary. But it’s not inevitable; it’s not part of the genetic makeup of the president’s tribe, the Kikuyu, and the runner-up’s tribe, the Luo or of any other tribes to both hate and kill one another.

Why the violence then? It’s about politics and poverty. For their own gain, politicians exploit tribal differences and manipulate the poor and the destitute. It’s no surprise that the perpetrators of “tribal violence” are usually idle young men who also loot and thieve while rampaging. Politicians often covertly hire or encourage them.

Would that more journalists skipped the facile and simplistic reductionism in their coverage of Africa. But it seems that expecting complexity is to expect too much.  Nonetheless, Chanoff and others have tried recently to counter some of the more noxious and vacuous coverage emanating from even the most respected newspapers and other media.

Sorry for the silence the last few days. Life (in this case a trip to see friends in the Rocky Mountains) intervened as it so often does.

South Africa’s electricity shortages have become increasingly acute, and now her neighbors are scrambling, with mixed results, to fill the void left by Eskom’s decision to pull the plug on power delivery across South Africa’s borders As a result, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana have all reported power failures, as each of those countries relies heavily on the electricity they import from Eskom, which made its decision largely because it has had difficulty even keeping the lights on in South Africa.

On the whole I’ve been pretty supportive of condemnation of Robert Mugabe coming from London and especially from Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It is thus disquieting to discover that perhaps Brown’s words represent bluster and palaver. When the rubber meets the road, Zimbabweans looking to England to escape Mugabe’s noxious kleptocracy are having a tough go of it.  According to a report from IRIN:

The British government’s loud condemnation of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe led many Zimbabweans to assume they could find easy refuge in the United Kingdom: the reality for asylum seekers has been far less straightforward.

According to Home Office figures, around 20,000 Zimbabweans sought asylum in Britain between 2000 and 2007; of those, 4,807 applications were successful - 944 of that total making it on appeal.

In 2000 - a year of state-sponsored election violence and land seizures in Zimbabwe - 95 percent of 1,010 asylum applications were refused. In 2002, after European governments condemned the conduct of presidential elections held in March, 62 percent of 7,655 applications were rejected. 

The number of asylum applications by Zimbabweans fell sharply from 2002, but in 2006 began to rise, reaching 1,650 requests; the trend continued in 2007, according to the Home Office. Successful applications, in terms of initial asylum decisions made before appeals are heard, were stuck at just 8 percent between 2004 and 2006, but rose to 19 percent in the last quarter of 2007.

A Home Office spokesperson, speaking to IRIN on condition of anonymity, denied that the immigration department was setting the bar unfairly high for Zimbabweans. “We know that the human rights situation is bad in Zimbabwe, but not everyone is at risk,” she said. “Every case is treated on its own merits and those who need protection will get it; the remainder would be encouraged to go back voluntarily, failing which they will be removed forcibly.”

It’s awfully easy to condemn, to tsk tsk from afar, or even to refuse to attend meetings with African nations if someone like Mugabe is going to be present. Those are acts of shallow statesmanship. Symbolically powerful, perhaps, and more than what the leaders of other nations have bothered to do, but still fairly low-hanging fruit. But the hard part is to take the action that will improve the lives of those suffering under the regime you have castgayed, rightly, as abhorrent. If Mugabe has turned his country into a hellishly brutal realm, London of all places owes the Zimbabwean people some form of succor. Granting asylum is only one means of providing redress, but it is also one easily available to Brown, Parliament, and the Home Office. Talk is cheap, Mr. Prime Minister.

More Zimbabwe correspondence from my friend.

The following are some more of the observations I made
during my short holiday in Zimbabwe:-

The country still does not have a formal currency. It
is still printing and using bearer cheques as legal
tender. Besides, the bearer cheques were and continue
to be in short supply resulting in long and winding
queues at banks. People spend hours on end in order to
withdraw money. After standing in the queue for so
long sometimes they are told that you can withdraw a
maximum of Z$5million or are advised that ‘cash is
finished try another branch or else come back
tomorrow.” Like I said in my earlier mail $5million is
nothing especially when people would have wanted to
withdraw larger (for those who have some money in the
bank)sums to buy food, pay rent, school fees etc.

The consequence of this scenario is continued queues at
banks everyday (i.e. areas around banks now resemble
huge or mini-political rallies) and people who have
other means of earning money are not motivated by this
situation to deposit their money with any bank
especially if you no longer have any say over when and
how much you want to withdraw. So instead of money
circulating in the formal market large sums of money
are circulating in the informal (black) market.

The agrarian reform programme is also being seriously
hampered by shortages of essential inputs such as seed,
fertiliser and other chemicals. In a season where
above rainfall figures have been recorded its
virtually impossible to do successful farming without
essential inputs. The effect of this is that many
resource-poor small-scale as well as some large-scale
farmers’ pieces of land are lying idle. This renders
agrarian reform almost meaningless.

In the first place, land should have been allocated on
the basis of capacity to do farming not as a campaign
or political tool.

More of the often tragic news from Zim as it comes in.