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SADC versus the people of Zimbabwe
AP Reeler, Idasa
November 20, 2008

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When two thirds of the SADC Presidents, sending their proxies instead, fail to turn up for a Summit that includes both the endless Zimbabwe crisis and the re-emergence of a war in the DRC, how should we understand this? And when the diluted Summit then allows Robert Mugabe to remain in the meeting while a decision on how the Zimbabwe crisis should be resolved is taken, and yet excludes the leader of the majority party in the putative new government, should Zimbabweans take SADC seriously any longer? After all this same august body, the body that endorsed the win by MDC in the March election and invalidated the June re-election of Robert Mugabe, still has the temerity by implication to castigate the opposition, shows deep misunderstanding of the agreement that they brokered, and apparently fails to appreciate the perilous situation in which Zimbabwe finds itself. This appalling lack of consistency in dealing with Zimbabwe must lead many to doubt the continued value of SADC driving any process concerning Zimbabwe.

This is the Alice in Wonderland of African politics, and the defaulting two-thirds, that were not present in Sandton, stand condemned with the colleagues they allowed to conduct this charade of political concern. This is not some back-country dispute of rural people, but a serious political crisis in the twenty-first century, and a crisis in which SADC, as a whole, have demanded that they alone, as Africans, be allowed to solve. This is not politics, but high farce of the kind that drags all of Africa, and not only SADC, into disrepute and ridicule. More seriously, it raises a question about the value of the whole SADC economic community concept and, raises a question for the Zimbabwean people about whether a future democratic Zimbabwe wishes to have anything to do with SADC.

But whether or not a future democratic Zimbabwe will value membership of SADC, there are now exceptionally serious questions about whether SADC is an institution with the gravitas to resolve the crisis, or is merely a club for all the old 'Liberation boys', who value each other over more than they value their respective peoples. For it is clear that this most recent decision of SADC has continued the old game of placing leaders above people.

Consider the following. SADC validates in sequence of the most disreputable African elections seen in recent decades, those in 2000 and 2001. Both were widely condemned as violent and rigged in favour of ZANU PF and Robert Mugabe, and resulted in international opprobrium: it was elections (and the obviously blunt violence that even SADC experienced at first hand) as well as the destruction of property rights that led to Zimbabwe's isolation, not merely land as ZANU PF endlessly asserts. In neither election could SADC easily call the results free and fair, instead, they resorted to the use of such damning terms as "a legitimate expression of the people's will," but it was entirely clear which people's will was being expressed and validated.

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