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A view of the summit
John M Morrison, The Guardian (UK)
August 20, 2007

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_morrison/2007/08/a_view_of_the_summit.html

African summits? Apart from the drummers and tribal dancers at the airport, they're much like summits anywhere else. Run up the flags, line up the Mercedes, switch on the TV cameras and keep the masses at a safe distance. But whatever the burning issue at the top of Africa's agenda, you can guarantee that the elderly men around the table will ignore it or fudge it before returning home.

That's a pretty cynical view, but it's the verdict I came to after three years reporting these bunfights in southern Africa in the 1980s. I even shared the occasional pot of hotel tea with Thabo Mbeki, then the exiled ANC's foreign minister. Since then, South Africa has joined the party, but judging by last week's Southern African Development Society (SADC) summit in Lusaka, Zambia, the habit of brushing difficult issues under the carpet hasn't gone away.

By failing for the umpteenth time to get to grips with the issue of Zimbabwe, the SADC leaders are seriously undermining Africa's credibility on the world stage. Once again, President Robert Mugabe has emerged unscathed and uncriticised by his peers. "We feel that the problems in Zimbabwe have been exaggerated," says Zambia's president Levy Mwanawasa. Well, tell that to the millions of Zimbabweans who have fled abroad and the millions left behind who are struggling with political dictatorship and economic collapse.

The continent's leaders seem to be in denial, but I think they may get a rude awakening the next time they lobby for a better global deal for their countries on the world stage. Gordon Brown and other leaders in the developed world, who have expended serious political capital trying to force through debt relief and more aid for Africa, can hardly be expected to do more on these issues if African leaders pretend that the continent's most spectacular example of bad government doesn't exist.

At the moment African countries are insisting that Mugabe, although banned from the EU, must have the right to attend an EU-Africa summit in Lisbon next September. If he does, then Brown will stay away - and he'll be right to do so.

A few years ago, Thabo Mbeki floated the idea of an African renaissance, where the continent would begin to solve its own problems. The age of clrruption, stagnation and dictatorship in Africa was over, we were encouraged to believe. Instead of monsters such as Mobutu and Bokassa, a new generation of leaders would begin to lead Africa forwards. Good government, democracy, human rights and economic reform would create a virtuous circle that would enable the continent to break free of the spiral of decline. Well, dream on.

The details of Zimbabwe's collapse are too well known to need repeating; to suggest, as many African leaders do, that hyperinflation, food shortages, mass emigration and plummeting life expectancy are somehow all the fault of Britain is an insult to anyone's intelligence. Mugabe himself may believe this, but that is no reason to humour his delusions.

The coalition of protesters that lobbied the Gleneagles summit two years ago on behalf of Africa and wore 'Make Poverty History' armbands has already dissolved, and many of them are choosing to demonstrate about climate change instead. Who can blame them? Africa needs to keep its friends around the world, but unless its leaders, Mbeki first and foremost, awake from dreamland and tell Mugabe his time is up, those friends will walk away.

In 1990, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of Zimbabwe's independence, when the country's outlook was still quite rosy, I drove through Harare's leafy northern suburbs to interview Ian Smith, the leader of the white minority rebels who declared unilateral independence in the 1960s rather than accept black majority rule.

After a few minutes listening to a self-justifying diatribe about the evils of black government by "communist terrorists" I switched off my tape recorder and politely made my excuses, shaking my white liberal head in amazement at his antedeluvian views.

Today I find it extremely painful to read the daily news from Zimbabwe and realise that perhaps "good old Smithy" had a point. Mugabe has managed in those 17 years since my interview to make the case for something utterly inconceivable - that Ian Smith was right all along in saying that black rule would lead to chaos.

So if African rulers want to banish the media stereotype of their continent as a place of famine and disaster, the first thing they have to do is put aside the cosy rules of the leaders' club and isolate Mugabe, just as European countries isolated the governments of Spain, Greece and Portugal when they were under dictatorship. If they can't deal with this issue in their own backyard, then turning up in Lisbon and asking the EU for help with their problems is going to be a complete waste of time.

* John M Morrison is a former foreign correspondent who was based in Zimbabwe from 1987 to 1990.

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