Back to Index

With Mugabe, adjusting your diplomatic volume has no effect
Tim Cohen, Business Day (SA)
July 27, 2005

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/article.aspx?ID=BD4A74545

WHAT should SA do about Zimbabwe? It is pretty well obvious that this is the most intractable issue of regional politics today.

The first thing to acknowledge is that the issue is not for SA to "deal" with, and never was.

However much we are appalled at the bulldozing of churches and mosques in the name of urban rectification, there are obvious limits to the role that the South African government can play.

Having a tactical nature, and perhaps with an eye to local politics, President Thabo Mbeki has played a calculated game, trying to simply ride out the issue. Taking a critical stance on mass land reform would have played badly locally, even if everybody knew the issue was just a political ploy for a constitutionally unsanctioned power grab. Zimbabwe was typically characterised as a "blind spot" in Mbeki’s outlook for reasons of historical comradeship. But I doubt this. Rather it was probably just a sense of powerlessness. When asked about Zimbabwe, government ministers make their frustration plain. "What do you think?", they ask. And of course there is no answer.

Mbeki’s policy has been called "quiet diplomacy" but this is a diplomatic nicety. What it means is a policy of noninterference, and a reliance on the untenable nature of the political situation to force itself, eventually, in more or less the right direction. Mbeki was gambling that a ship so obviously listing would naturally tend to right itself. He gambled wrong.

In a sense, it was the same tactic used by the west against apartheid SA. The similarities don’t end there, but there are differences. The first was that SA was of some international economic consequence. There were also diplomatic issues, like the situation in Angola and Namibia, which complicated the west’s response.

But Zimbabwe is different. The hard economic fact is that Zimbabwe is at most a marginal issue in terms of trade and economic significance. The political fallout for SA is marginal and easily eclipsed by larger issues. Zimbabwe is a nonentity on the world stage, and becoming more so, no matter what the Chinese might think.

But, of course, Zimbabwe constitutes a huge moral disaster. I wonder what people who called Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe their "hero" think now? He is the embodiment of all the worst stereotypes of African leadership; he reinforces the notion of the African Potemkin style of democracy in which citizens vote, but their votes are not charged with the power to change governments; he strengthens the view that if it comes down to a straight choice between economic destruction and power change, African leaders will choose the former, and that they are quite prepared to exploit ethnic and racial differences.

None of these charges hold true across Africa, but there have been enough examples on the continent over the past 40 years to lend them some credibility. More importantly, they are becoming less true as the second wave of profreedom, pro-democracy and procapitalist leaders are coming to power. But against this broad trend, one of the old thugs of Africa’s first wave of leadership remains stubbornly entrenched.

The question is whether SA’s bankrolling of Zimbabwe changes the situation, or makes it worse. Government seems to feel that the consequences of intervening financially are worse than the consequences of doing nothing. It is also important to be clear on what taking over the financing of Zimbabwe means: that SA’s taxpayers are being forced to take over financial responsibility for Zimbabwe, where the global community, embodied by the International Monetary Fund, has decided the risk is too high.

In short, from taxpayers’ point of view it is money down the drain, because it will never be repaid. Whatever government says about "strict conditions", such a loan cannot be anything other than a partial, tacit endorsement of the Zimbabwean government’s political thuggery. In the informal networks that constitute the most important level of international communication, this will count against us.

It is also exactly the opposite of what is required. Mbeki needs to gain allies in his efforts to force political change in Zimbabwe. Taking over financial support for Zimbabwe means the world has washed its hands of the problem, and will make international organisations less inclined to deal with the situation collectively. They want to forget about Zimbabwe, just as they have forgotten about countries like Burma.

The situation also makes a mockery of regional efforts to improve Africa’s image. Mugabe skillfully judged that African leaders were not united enough or emphatic enough to enforce their views. How right he was.

Are there alternatives? Of course. The first would be to gather international support for the R6bn loan rather than blithely funding it (or a part of it) ourselves. Too often the debate has been framed as a question of "megaphone" or "quiet" diplomacy, but this is a digression. The question is: how do you deal with someone impossible to deal with? And the answer is that you don’t.

*Cohen is editor at large.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP