The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has
just concluded its Extraordinary Summit of Heads of State and Government in
Harare, Zimbabwe – yet another mostly useless talk shop that once again ignored
some of the region’s biggest problems that have directly impacted South Africa.
Very little if at all any throughput and follow-up action is expected from what
was essentially a self-indulgent talk shop and cocktails-sipping occasion. It
also wouldn’t have done much to support President Cyril Ramaphosa’s
Africa-centred crusade at the far bigger G20 summit.
Not too many actual heads of states/governments turned up
to attend the Harare summit it seems, despite being billed as being held for
them. Instead, they sent representatives in their place – a demonstration
perhaps of their own low regard for the SADC organs and events as an
institution trapped in its own truth-denying paralysis.
South Africa reportedly sent Deputy President Paul
Mashatile – understandable as President Ramaphosa was away in Brazil for the
G20 summit where he had much bigger fish to fry – a prestigious international
stage versus a hardly noticed little regional talk shop, while at the G20
summit the company was also quite a few notches more important (and wealthier)
than in Harare and the news TV coverage immensely better – things that most
politicians covet.
The biggest takeaway of the underreported Harare event
was not what occurred there, but rather that which was not even officially on
the agenda – Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and quite a few other things too. With
Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa hosting the Harare event, his country
and his authoritarian government’s many sins and threats to regional stability,
economic growth, human rights and democratic freedoms were never going to be on
the agenda anyhow given the SADC’s appalling track record on that one.
And those few media that did report on the summit, got it
wrong, like a major German news channel which reported that the summit focus
was on post-election unrest in Mozambique when, in fact, it was on the
situation/peace-keeping mission in Eastern DRC, which was the officially stated
reason for convening the Harare summit in the first place. Perhaps an African
sub-region is not important enough in the global scheme of things for a major
international media outlet to even get its facts straight. Maybe, and sadly,
they don’t know the two countries apart. But then again, the SADC secretariat
apparatus should perhaps blame itself for that.
If an African regional bloc like the SADC cannot even get
its own act together and generate better credibility for itself, few of the big
guns at the G20 were likely going to take President Ramaphosa very seriously
when he once again pleaded for Africa to have a bigger say and more clout in
global events by “reforming” international institutions like the United
Nations. Which is a pity. Not only the SADC, but also the coup-riddled West
Africa where Russian mercenaries now rule the roost in cahoots with their
illegitimate African military paymasters, and the many conflicts, atrocities
and radical Islamic insurgencies causing untold grief in eastern and
north-eastern Africa and Horn of Africa countries and regions like Mozambique,
Sudan, Somalia, Tigray and Eritrea, are more nails in that coffin.
And for Elias Magosi, the SADC Executive Secretary to say
the region is generally calm and stable with only isolated insecurity in the
DRC, as reported by the SABC, is an embarrassing and outright lie. Far from
being isolated, the situation in Eastern DRC directly involves several
neighbouring countries; necessitated an international peacekeeping force; has
grossly destabilised the DRC itself and continues doing so; and until very
recently still claimed the lives of South African soldiers among those from other
countries. Perhaps the hapless Magosi has just become immune to the impacts on
the region after so many years of indiscriminate bloodletting, human rights
abuses, political abuses and instability, or he lives in a fool’s paradise.
Neither is the region “generally calm and stable”.
Mozambique is plagued by a bloody Islamic insurgency in the north that has
displaced thousands of people and brought in military forces from several
countries, including South Africa, while bringing to a standstill the gas
fields that could lift Mozambicans and even the region out of poverty (it its
proceeds are not stolen by the ruling elite).
Furthermore, Mozambique has been wracked by domestic
turmoil and protests as thousands of its citizens dispute the outcome of the
recent elections they say had been rigged to illegitimately return FRELIMO and
its presidential candidate to power after their many years of misrule,
corruption and oppression on the heels of their brutally enforced and immensely
failed socialist experiment under the late Samora Machel. With the Lebombo
border incident, these protests also directly impacted South Africa. But instead
of condemning this situation and proposing some corrective intervention, the
SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Co-operation congratulated FRELIMO
on its “victory”. This is an indictment not of the SADC as an abstract
geopolitical entity but of each of the member states in their own right.
In neighbouring Zimbabwe, the ruling ZANU-PF’s decades
long disregard for human rights, democratic freedoms, fair elections, and its
brutal repression of the opposition and high levels of corruption and economic
mismanagement, have all but brought economic growth and development to a
standstill with millions of food-starved Zimbabweans trapped in poverty. In
both instances a direct consequence has been a flood of illegal immigrants
coming to South Africa (and to other regional countries) where they now have
become an “issue” and a cause of domestic political conflict.
Perhaps these are some of the things the SADC could
better spend its time, energy and money on as part of entertaining the real
truth of the regional situation. A summit that gets to grips with that, would
be time and money well spent.
