Southern Africa Report (Johannesburg)
23 June 2011
The initiative continues to slip from aging President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe’s fraught negotiations towards a new constitution and a general election.
His once-total control of the Zimbabwean state has been further weakened by his comprehensive defeat at the 11-12 June Sandton Summit of SADC heads of state, among whom he is increasingly isolated – even from liberation-era allies Namibia and Angola.
His defeat was choreographed by South African President Jacob Zuma‘s SADC-mandated facilitations team on Zimbabwe, but made possible by the palpable frustration among SADC presidents at Zimbabwe’s apparently-endless disruption of SADC’s real business and, less directly, of their domestic affairs. Botswana Vice-President Mompati Merafhe complained during the summit that Zimbabwe was keeping the region “in crisis mode”.
The presidents want Zimbabwe removed as an obstacle to SADC’s focus on economic cooperation and development and recognise that Zuma is their best bet in achieving this.
Traditional Mugabe allies Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos and DRC President Joseph Kabila stayed away rather than participate it what they feared would be an explosive confrontation. The extent of Mugabe’s isolation is demonstrated by the mandates both gave to their stand-ins (Angolan Minister of External Relations Georges Rebelo Pinto Chikoti and DRC Minister of Regional and International Cooperation Raymond Tshibanda N’tungamulongo): vote with Zuma.
Mugabe arrived at the summit confident of reversing the setbacks suffered through endorsement by SADC’s Troika (currently Zambia, Mozambique and South Africa) on Politics, Defence and Security in Livingstone, Zambia, on 31 March 2011 of a report from the South African facilitators on lack of progress by the Zimbabwe parties in implementing their Global Political Agreement (GPA). He and his Zanu PF party leadership had lobbied the region extensively, while Zanu PF ministers and senior civil servants had, after stalling on the GPA for months, ensured a flurry of post-Livingstone progress to equip Mugabe with evidence against Zuma in Sandton (see SAR Vol 29 No 12 and SAR Vol 29 No 17).
The lobbying achieved little and Zuma easily turned the “evidence” of GPA progress against Mugabe, pointing out that it was all achieved only after SADC’s Livingstone criticism. SADC took the point: only if the SADC dogs bark does the Zimbabwe caravan move on.
A second key Mugabe error was to implicitly criticise SADC’s somnambulant bureaucracy, suggesting the absence of written versions of the report to the Livingstone meeting had seriously disadvantaged him. This provoked a furious protest from SADC executive Tomaz Salomão.
Mugabe’s effectiveness was further undermined by repeated reference to Zuma as “Mandela” – a Freudian slip which graphically explains the Zimbabwean president’s view of his South African counterpart. Mugabe had a tempestuous relationship with South Africa’s first democratic president, with whom he clashed angrily throughout Mandela’s term as chair of SADC, and resented South Africa’s relatively greater regional power and influence.
In the event, the Sandton Summit was an anti-climax. Mugabe’s lobbying achieved little, and SADC endorsed not only the South African facilitators’ criticisms and approach, but incorporated Zuma’s precise phrase at Livingstone on the need for Zimbabwe to “create a conducive environment to the holding of elections that will be free and fair, under conditions of a level political field” into its resolution and communiqué.
It also pushed even harder than the Troika had at Livingstone on the need to have a direct and hands-on SADC involvement inside Zimbabwe and on giving implementation rights to the GPA monitoring structure, the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (Jomic) – the Livingstone recommendations to which Zanu PF objected most strongly as undermining Zimbabwe sovereignty. The post-summit communiqué recorded SADC urging “the … Troika (members) to appoint their representatives as soon as possible to participate in the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (Jomic)” and mandating “the (SADC) Secretariat to mobilise resources for Jomic for it to discharge its functions”.
SADC entirely ignored Mugabe’s attempts to block finalisation of an “election roadmap” – a binding schedule of deliverables and timeframes – which it accepted as a fait accompli.
And despite former Zimbabwe Information Minister Jonathan Moyo‘s post-Sandton crusade to spin South African media into believing that SADC had rejected Zuma’s initiatives, SADC actually “commended His Excellency Jacob G Zuma … for his efforts towards the full implementation of the Global Political Agreement”. In the chocked communiqué-speak of SADC summits, this is a gushing endorsement.
The scene is now set for the arrival of the Troika representatives in Harare to work with the multi-party Jomic, strengthened both by implicit acceptance of the need to give it implementation powers, particularly in dealing with political violence; and the decision that SADC will raise funds to enable it to properly “discharge its functions”. This is alluded to only indirectly in the communiqué. “Discharging its functions” in the context of political violence suggests that Pretoria sees Jomic as the means by which SADC will rein in and restrict Zimbabwe’s highly partisan security forces, under circumstances in which there is neither the time nor sufficient consensus on a programme of security sector reform.
The Zambia-Mozambique-South Africa team to be deployed in Harare has not yet been identified. They will, however, inevitably work closely with the South African facilitation team which has, for the first time, injected some momentum into the Zimbabwe process.
Mugabe, meanwhile, is by no means without options. He looked uncomfortable throughout the summit, and drained at its conclusion. Since his return to Harare the Zanu PF brains trust is re-thinking its strategy. Its usual, instinctive response to political pressure is to unleash the police on to the citizenry, but it will recognise that this is unwise in the Troika team’s first days in Harare.
Despite the Sandton Summit outcome, both Washington and London (which leads the EU on Zimbabwe) are unlikely to drop the array of limited sanctions it has deployed against Zanu PF’s leadership. Instead they can be expected to grant a small reward to SADC in the form of selective removal of some of the restrictions – possibly those against parastatals which most inhibit Zimbabwe’s reintegration into global commerce.
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Zimbabwe: Harare Prepares for Region to Put Boots On the Ground