Africa

Jacob Zuma desperately wants to avoid the corruption charges that he faces. The talk when I was in South Africa was that the charges would be thrown out, less on the merits than out of a sense of expediency. At the same time, Zuma needs the charges either to go away or to be weakened to the point where he can reasonably argue that he faces a political witch hunt. Conviction on charges that have sent some of his alleged co-conspirators to prison would presumably sound the death knell for his presidential ambitions.

For all of these reasons, today’s decision by South Africa’s Constitutional Court that the search and seizure of Zuma’s property was proper looms as a particularly grim defeat, especially coming as it does just days before Zuma’s lawyers are going to try to have the corruption charges against him dismissed. The court also dismissed Zuma’s appeal to stop the National Prosecution Authority (NPA) from utilizing documents that had been part of the case against Zuma’s convicted former financial advisor Schabir Sheik on charges of fraud and corruption similar to those the ANC leader now faces.

Even more ominous for Zuma, the first decision came with only one dissent. The second was unanimous. Thus the country’s highest court, which has for some time been presumed to be pretty evenly split along, for lack of a better conceptual framework, Zuma-Mbeki lines now appears to be fairly united in terms of its attempts to focus on the matters of law in the Zuma case. The Constituional crisis that many observers thought might come to pass as the result of the supposed divisions on the court appear to have been dramatically overstated or else have been ameliorated for the greater good. Either way, Jacob Zuma is having a bad day.

Morgan Tsvangirai is walking a delicate balance for very high stakes in Zimbabwe. While trying, ultimately, to unseat President Robert Mugabe (and let there be no mistake that this has been his goal all along, with the negotiations for power sharing merely a stopping point and not an acceptable final resolution) he also has to make sure that he does nothing to cause Mugabe to revert to form, withdraw from talks, and foment a return to the political carnage over which Mugabe has for so long presided.

An example of just how delicate Tsvangirai’s situation is becomes apparent in his comments today. While making clear that he wants Mugabe to make an “honourable exit,” he also asserted in words that could have come from the mouth of Nelson Mandela or Desmond Tutu during the CODESA negotiations or Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) hearings that Mugabe is “”just as human as every one of us.” Admittedly, Tsvangirai was perhaps less Tutuesque when he qualified his praise by also maintaining “although of course I think he is ignorant, or chooses to be in denial, as far as the violence is concerned.”

As is Thabo Mbeki’s wont, the South African President is still optimistic about the end result of the ongoing Zimbabwean negotiations. Mbeki is a member of a small minority on this front.

Two headlines about South African emigration from Independent On-Line appeared within the same week. The first: “Whites Leaving SA in Droves.” The second:  ”Whites Return to South Africa.” Is this schizophrenia at work? Shoddy journalism? Or, as I believe, an example of South Africans perceiving a problem and generally believing the worst even when there is contravailing evidence to the doomsaying?

Emigration is one of the big fears that many South Africans have. It fits a nice narrative for the nattering nabobs of negativism: South Africa is getting worse! Rather than stay ina  country they love, people are willing to seek their opportunities elsewhere! A third of the country thinks about leaving! It’s the ANC’s fault! Look, even blacks are increasingly thinking of emigrating! 

And yet for generations whites have left South Africa. A sliver left because of moral revulsion to apartheid. A far larger proportion left because the prospect of a black-led South Africa fueled their vision of swart gevaar. Still others left because people leave their home countries all the time for myriad reasons, some for good, some for short-term opportunities, and still others for indeterminate lengths of time. I am not convinced yet that emigration is an actual concern and I am convinced that some of the polling methodology being relied upon in these examples is, if not shoddy, at least misleading. In other words: Calm down. All of the “good South Africans” are not going to leave, and those that do leave are not going to resign South Africa to a bleak, talentless, equity-free future. Among some sectors of South Africa the sky is always going to be falling.  

In the sort of sound economic reasoning that we have all come to expect from Harare, the Zimbabwean government plane to chop a bunch of zeroes off of the country’s currency, thus re-denominating, though not re-valuating the plummeting Zimbabwean dollar. Beyond making math a little easier for people carrying around bricks of the country’s virtually worthless notes, I have no idea what ZANU-PF expects to accomplish with this little act of chicanery. Let us forget about how this will happen logistically, given that the cost of making most of Zimbabwe’s notes is more expensive than the notes themselves are worth, and that for this to work the country will have to introduce all new currency. Cunning.

Three stories caught my eye this morning, all of which fall into the category of disappointing, but not surprising.

1) The power-sharing talks over Zimbabwe have broken down over the question of what role Morgan Tsvangirai will play. The sides appear to have rather different conceptions of the role the Movement for Democratric Change leader will have in any new government. Mugabe’s people want him shuffled off to the post of third vice president, a post about as useful as teats on a bull. Tsvangirai wants to be the country’s Prime Minister with considerable powers. This news should come as a shock to absolutely no one. Mugabe does not want to share leadership. And without being forced to do so, he surely sees these negotiations as just another way to buy time and apply window dressing without actually yielding an inch on issues that matter.

2) In Uganda, the Baganda people are growing increasingly discontented with the rule of President Yoweri Museveni. Tired of feeling marginalised, the people of the ancient kingdom, and now state, of Buganda have a long list of grievances, beginning with seemingly ubiquitous contestations over land.  Museveni needs to find a way to compromise and to reach out to the Baganda, or else the stability of his country, not to mention his leadership, are in jeopardy.

3) The precarious health of Zambia’s President Levy Mwanawasa has led to fears of a power vacuum emerging in that country. Mwanawasa, who recently suffered a stroke, and whose rumors of death were premature but very real across Africa, has been silent and absent for more than a month, leading to unseemly but very real struggles for leadership in Zambia.

This is a bit belated, but I wanted to share my Cape Argus Zim Op Ed from June 25 in which I lament Morgan Tsvangirai dropping out of the race and utilize an example from the American Civil Rights Movement as an example of what I worried that his departure from the race might mean.

There is a reason why economics is known as the “dismal science.” For all of the accoutrements of precision and exactitude, the reality is that much of economics is at least as much alchemy as science, and the supposed “laws” of economics are more like guidelines than immutable realities.

It is thus not surprising that Thabo Mbeki and some of his critics have such wildly varying views of his economic policies. Mbeki defends his record by pointing out the consistent, steady rates of growth of the South African economy under his watch and argues that his policies have prevented some of the econolic calamities experienced elsewhere. His critics, the SACP and COSATU chief among them, believe that he is not doing enough to address poverty and accuse him of being delusional about the direction of the economy.

Both arguments have merit, but when it comes to economic policies, I tend not to buy into what the SACP wants to sell. Mbeki has not done enough to embrace anti-poverty programs, and the gap  between the haves and have nots, which continues to grow, is appalling. Nonetheless, the anti-liberalism pablum that the leftists on the Tri-Partite Alliance want to spew also leaves me cold. In an ideal world the government would continue on its course while expanding enough to embrace more ardent programs to address inequality, poverty, unemployment and the like.

Tony King, a professor at the University of the West of England, uses this Guardian article on the currency crisis as a springboard to what strikes me as some reasonable commentary at H-SAfrica:

. . .  The government is running out of paper for banknotes, and is facing the prospect of losing the software licence as the German firm that supplies both is withdrawing from Zimbabwe, which means the army and police will go unpaid - and may well be contributing to Zanu-PF’s willingness to negotiate. This kind of thing doesn’t readily make the headlines, but it’s an example of how sanctions *can* work, an antidote perhaps to the received wisdom in some circles that sanctions are ineffective.

 The question should never simply be “Do sanctions work?” But rather the questions we should ask are more complicated: What sort of sanctions? Enacted how? To what ends? Proponents of sanctions can rightfully point to those levied against Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. Opponents can equally rightly look to the American policies against Cuba as an example of ineffective sanctions. Circumstances and conditions matter much more than blanket arguments for or against sanctions absent context.

A key rule in understanding politics is to take with a grain of salt when one party tries to define, contextualize, predict, or provide historical context for another. Another key rule is to make sure that other parties are not in a position to define yours.

I thought of (read: made up) these iron-clad rules when I read two articles in which Democratic Alliance leader and Cape Town mayor Helen Zille made two pronouncements about the African National Congress. the first of these was that the ANC is going the way of the National Party, with its divisions between verligte and verkrampte, or enlightened and reactionary members. Beyond the offensiveness of comparing the ANC to the party against which it fought for so long, the analogy seems shallow, forced, and ahistorical, a silly and patronizing attempt to provide analysis and prescription for a party that it is in Helen Zille’s very real interest to see not succeed in the first place.

Zille’s second assertion is no less self-serving than the first, though it may be somewhat more accurate. In the DA’s online newsletter Zille argued in a piece putatively honoring Nelson Mandela that Mandela’s “legacy is being undermined by powerful elements in the ruling party.” Zille’s tribute to Mandela was undoubtedly sincere — the DA has been a vocal advocate of erecting a statue in honor of Mandela at parliament and plans to reopen debate about doing so again. But it also takes a certain level of hubris for the opposition leader to presume to speak in the name of a man who is still alive, who is still a member of the ANC, and who led that organization through its years in the wilderness.

Zille is not alone in her belief that the current ANC has forsaken some of the high ground it possessed a decade ago. But inapt historical analogies and purporting to speak for Mandela’s legacy strikes me as the sort of “consider the source” argumentation that somewhat invalidates much of what she has to say. Nonetheless the ANC has enough of an image problem in the country that her words probably resonate with a sizable minority within the country. For if there is a third rule of politics that I would like to make up here, it is that a party that is unable to define itself will be defined by others. The solons in the ANC’s various factions would be wise to pay heed to this rule more than any other.

Even as Kenya moves forward from the political violence that set the country alight at the beginning of the year after the fiercely contested netional elections, there are still hundreds of people who were displaced as a result of the violence living in camps around Nairobi. Chaos that takes just days or weeks to flare and abate can take months and years to overcome.