Africa

Because everyone needs a bit of a comedown before heading into the weekend, here is a bit of a roundup of Zimbabwe-related stories.

South African President Thabo Mbeki has traveled to Zimbabwe for talks on the country’s disputed election. Acting both as South African head of state and as the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) mediator Mbeki will meet with President Robert Mugabe, but it is unclear whether he will also meet with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), making one wonder just what sort of mediation he could possibly envision emerging from his trip, especially since the MDC continues to insist that it will not participate in a runoff that it perceives to be a sham.
As violence escalates across the country death tolls are beginning to rise. Farmers and farm workers in rural areas are especially vulnerable to the violence, as are lawyers, journalists, and trade unionists.

As if the actual and impending violence is not ominous enough, the Chinese vessel carrying arms intended for Zimbabwe that was turned away from South African waters weeks ago is still afloat on African waters. The South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (SATAWU) reports that the ship, An Yue Jiang, is still in search of a hospitable port and is headed toward Congo-Brazzaville in hopes of being able to offload its deadly cargo there. Somehow that ship, in both its tenacity and its desperation, but also because of the violence that it portends, stands as a pretty grim metaphor for the cynical machinations of Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF.

In a welcome op-ed piece in the Mail & Guardian William Gumede calls for Africa to be more “hard-nosed” with regard to China. Gumede uses China’s attempted (and truly unjustifiable) attempt to ship arms to Zimbabwe as a springboard to express larger concerns about the role China might want to play across the continent.

The news cycle is tough to predict. That much I think we can all agree upon. As much as the world has been outraged by the events of recent weeks in Zimbabwe, who knew that it would take a bizarre arms shipment to sharpen the focus? Even China, whose willingness to destabilize Africa for its own benefit appears to have no limits, and which obtusely sees nothing wrong with the scenario they have fomented, seems to be wavering on whether the infamous ship bearing arms bound for Zimbabwe, a country that certainly does not need more weapons right now, will reach its destination. African leaders, including many in South Africa, are finally beginning to rouse from their seeming somnolence to question this deal and in some cases to condemn it, or at least to make clear that they will not facilitate it. In the end, it is possible that the ship may reach Zim, but for that to happen, some country will have to facilitate the arms getting overland to landlocked Zimbabwe, and one hopes that regional pressure will be enough to prevent that from happening.

Combine Nigeria’s vast oil reserves and the instability those riches have brought with China’s avarice and rapaciousness when it comes to its thirst for oil and it seems to me that a recipe for disaster is simmering. China is prepared to loan Nigeria billions that in turn will grant the Chinese access to Nigeria’s reserves and markets. The problem with this arrangement is that Nigeria’s oil, which in theory should have enriched the country and helped its economy to prosper has proven to be a resource that has enriched a few at the expense of the many. China’s obstinate insistence on national sovereignty (well, for others anyway) means that Nigeria will have even less motivation to reform to ensure that oil is not a curse on the country. A partnership between China and Nigeria has disaster scrawled all over it.

At The Washington Realist Nikolas Gvosdev makes a salient point about how the Western powers have a tendency to blame China for the instability in the Sudan (and to a lesser extent places such as Zimbabwe) and then use China’s (admittedly noxious) behaviors as a cover for their own inaction.