South Africa

Periodically you’ll hear the whispering: FIFA is displeased with South Africa’s progress in preparing to host the World Cup in 2010. Every sign of “political instability” (which is a patronizing way of referring to political division, which every vibrant democracy has) or possible internal conflicts in the organizing effort sends the FIFA overlords and Afro-pessimists scurrying to consider other options. Danny Jordaan, the chief executive of South Africa’s World Cup Local Organising Committee (LOC), rejects reports that the body is beset by infighting. President Thabo Mbeki and Sports Minister Makhenkesi Stofile insist that the World Cup will go on and along with many optimists that they will be a rousing success, with some going so far as to argue that the World Cup will do for Cape Town what the Olympics did for Bercelona, w3hich hosted the Summer Games in 1992.

To be sure there are legitimate concerns about the World Cup. The recent power outages must be disquieting for even the most cockeyed of optimists and while crime is an easy bugaboo for the country’s detractors, it is also a very real issue. But as with so much in South African life, internal dissent seems to break down largely along racial lines, with whites being the most pessimistic about the country’s chances to pull off what will be an impressive (and at times seemingly Herculean) task. South Africa will accomplish a successful and historic World Cup.

Will there be glitches both in the lead-up and over the course of the event itself? Surely. Just as there are glitches in the planning and lead-up to every Olympics, World Cup, and other vital global sporting event. Surely it is more daunting to host an Olympics in London in 2012 than a World Cup in South Africa in 2010, and there will be similar infighting, political and infrastructural impediments and unanticipated issues that will emerge, and yet no one will question the innate ability of Londoners or of the English to handle such an immense undertaking. There were lots of questions about Athens’ ability and preparedness to handle the 2004 Olympics. The International Olympic Committee has found itself embroiled in scandal, particularly when it came to the awarding of the Salt Lake City bid. None of these aroused the sorts of reductionist concerns that haunt the 2010 preparations. Hopefully all of the doubters will be effusive in their praise — and their apologies — after what may prove to be the most lively of all World Cups.

Charles R. Stith, a former US ambassador to Tanzania and director of the African Presidential Archives and Research Center at Boston University, has an op-ed piece in today’s Boston Globe endorsing the Millennium Challenge Initiative as a way to help develop Africa. He argues that partisan squabbling over the amount of funding to provide the MCI is akin to an old proverb that asserts that when elephants fight it is the grass that suffers. It seems to me that it would be worth providing the full funding that President Bush wants if only to see if the program is viable.

Is there hope for an abatement of political violence in Kenya’s ongoing crisis? Despite more deaths in clashes between protesters and police, allegations of banditry, and fears of ethnic cleansing, guarded optimism may be in order as international appeals coupled with Kofi Annan’a active intervention appears to have led to an agreement between President Mwai Kibaki, whose dubious victory in a highly contested election fueled the current nightmare, and the opposition and its leader Raila Odinga. (The Council on Foreign Relations has a useful background primer on Kenyan politics.)

But the emphasis should be on “guarded.” Leaders who allow violence to be unleashed oftentimes find that their ability to marshal that violence becomes limited if nonexistent. Anarchy as a method of control, so popular among Big Men, has a way of spiralling out of control. Once convinced that one group of people is an enemy and violence is the only course of redress, even the most ardent followers will be tough to convince that violence should cease if the alleged enemy is still among them. Demogoguery, cult of personality, the unleashing of terror (and not the hackneyed “tribalism” that some are so quick to attribute when things go awry in Africa) — these things tend to get away from those who choose to use them as means and methods.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Europe-Africa summit has come and gone. Robert Mugabe was the most visible figure at the summit, and he made his share of noise, prattling on about most of the same things about that which he prattles whenever he has cameras on him and with his acquiescent media lapdogs at home lauding him as a hero. At least one European leader, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, condemned Mugabe for his bullying, thuggish, destructive leadership but most of the rest of the attendees could not be bothered, just as they could not be bothered to do anything significant with regard to Darfur, trade, China’s role in Africa, crises in places such as Somalia, or much of anything else. For all of the optimistic talk heading into the conference,  division and disappointment were the coin of the realm in Lisbon, where little concrete progress was made.

The EU-Africa summit kicks off tonight in grand style. The central figure in the drama that plays out will still be Robert Mugabe whose very inclusion in the meeting has been the source of much debate in the past few months. Still a hero to a few but a pariah to most, the wily despot, who recently announced that only “friendly nations” will be allowed to observe next year’s elections, will almost assuredly be the center of attention for much of the meeting.

Gordon Brown has every right to boycott the summit, and quite a lot of justification, but an even better approach might be for those leaders who do attend the summit to confront Mugabe frontally. This would give Mugabe the platform that many will dread him having, and will inevitably give him a chance to denounce his critics as imperialists and puppets, but he’s likely to do that anyway. What would be most reassuring would be if some African heads of state, even those who believed Mugabe has every right to attend the meeting, broke their silence to condemn Mugabe’s brutal regime.