Africa

For a party that claims “We are not shaken, we are unbreakable and we are indestructible,” the African National Congress sure is spending a lot of time disavowing being shaken, broken, or destroyed. And it is planning to spend an awful lot of time and resources fighting the right of the breakaway faction of the ANC to call itself the “Congress of the People” (COP).

The COP, meanwhile, is spending its time and resources on the perhaps more prosaic work of actually garnering support, especially in those provinces where it looks to have enough strength to take over political control, whether on its own or in coalitions. The Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, Western Cape and North West have shown signs that for all of the ANC’s bluster, it may not be the only game in town any more.

All signs indicate that Robert Mugabe is winning in Zimbabwe.

Give the old tyrant his due. Terror and violence and chaos are not the only tools in his arsenal. He also has shown himself to be a master of delay, both in playing out the elections over the course of this year and in terms of holding out long enough in the ongoing negotiations for him to be able effectively to claim victory. Foot-dragging, obfuscation, confusion, and malingering too have their place in the Big Man’s bag of tricks. Mugabe has deployed them all brilliantly.

The latest volley in the negotiations have sputtered out, this time with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) unable to cajole Mugabe, with whom far too many SADC leaders have cozy relationships,  to yield so much as a centimeter. SADC tried to broker a deal whereby Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC would form a unity government and split remaining contested ministries, including Home Affairs, an outcome that would serve ZANU-PF and Mugabe well and the MDC (and the nation) not well at all. Home Affairs controls the police, and control of the police and military (which under previous agreements ZANU-PF would run) is a vital part of Mugabe’s power. Splitting these security forces is thus vital to any legitimate agreement. MDC has justly refused to acquiesce to these wholly inequitable demands.

Stalemate serves Mugabe well. Having long ago abandoned even a pretense of caring about legitimacy, Mugabe cares most about power and control. And with the latest developments, Mugabe is simply proceeding as if he had a mandate to act and is pushing forward with a new Zimbabwe government that is favorable to his party’s, and thus his, needs.

Robert Mugabe is winning in Zimbabwe, as so many of us feared that he would. Do not expect him to be gracious if he successfully consolidates his rule. You’d be wiser, in fact, to expect the opposite.

Exiled from her native South Africa for her political stances for more than three decades, the African singing voice of a generation, the embodiment of the Pan-African ideal, Miriam Makeba was many things in her rich, at times tragic life. Her passing, which came right after a performance in Italy on Sunday, has inspired memories of this great woman and her myriad gifts not only to music, but also to humanity.

Here she is performing arguably her greatest song, “Pata Pata”

Prominent British blogger Norm Geras has looked at the Zimbabwe power-sharing negotiations, and especially SADC’s recent attempts to intervene, and has come away unimpressed:

The power-sharing deal in Zimbabwe, for everything that was wrong with it in requiring a compromise between those who had won the recent elections and the architects of the country’s decline who had lost them, did at least envisage some power-sharing, opening hopes thereby of the start of a genuine transition: Mugabe was to retain his hold on the army, but Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC would have control of the police. Mugabe subsequently modified the deal in a clever way by deciding to keep the police as well as the army for Zanu-PF. This weekend the Southern African Development Community met to consider the matter. They didn’t insist upon Mugabe backing down. No, they insisted only on a government of national unity in Zimbabwe being formed immediately, with ‘control of the disputed home affairs ministry, which oversees the police’ to be… shared between Mugabe and the MDC. A grand regional solution.

This, of course, is the problem with toothless intervention. Without will and without enforcement mechanisms and without even a viable stick, international organizations, such as SADC, that ought to have at least regional leverage, can exacerbate existing situations when tyrants like Mugabe realize that there is no cost to violating agreements. For such organizations, there needs to be something of a Hippocratic Oath: Do No Harm.

We might be reminded again of the need for SADC and other groups to remember that they must always keep in mind that they are engaged in determining what is possible rather than what is desirable, and in expanding what fits into that former category. SADC is now talking about augmenting United Nations peacekeeping forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For IRIN reports that while SADC may be willing, their military forces are also weak, and that such intervention might thus prove worthless, again undermining a regional body that cannot afford to be made to look any weaker. And shody intervention could well fall into the category of doing harm in the long run.   

The celebrations of Barack Obama’s victory in the American Presidential elections were as intense and delirious and glorious in Kenya, the land of Obama’s ancestry, as anyplace. Indeed, the results of Tuesday’s elections set off a wave of euphoric celebration that were perhaps unparalelled in the country’s post-independence history. 

G. Paschal Zacary argues in Foreign Policy that Kenyans have projected outsized, unrealistic expactations on Obama:

Yet there is undeniably an over-the-top quality about Kenya’s embrace of Obama. The government declared a national holiday to celebrate the Illinois senator’s victory over John McCain. The National Theater is staging “Obama: The Musical,” which explores the next president’s life through song. There are appeals for Kenya to officially petition the United States to become the 51st state. And the country is already making plans to host a visit from the president-elect, even though Obama hasn’t indicated when, if ever, he will come.

Obamania in Kenya has gone on for years now, but the hype isn’t just about the president-elect’s roots. Rather, Kenya’s Obama fixation seems to represent a kind of escapist fantasy for an African country beset by political dysfunctionality. Still raw with the memory of the electoral violence that left hundreds dead last spring, Kenya is thirsty for exactly the sort of change Obama represents. Indeed, the Illinois senator seems to possess everything that Kenya’s political leaders lack: youthfulness, a conciliatory image, and the hope of transcending narrow ethnic identities in favor of a common national interest.

Yet in some ways, Kenya’s euphoria is comparable to that among Obama’s supporters in the United States, who are nearly desperate for change after eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration, and across the globe, who have seen their respect and admiration for the United States plummet in most parts of the world.  And in all of those cases, Obama’s supporters and admirers now need to reconfigure their own expectations. Obama is a talented politician who, it has been said, has a first-rate intellect and a first-rate temperament. But the United States faces serious challenges at home and abroad and Obama, for all of his gifts, is no miracle worker. Kenyans, and Obama supporters the world over, need to recalibrate their expectations so as not to turn Obama as a failure only by virtue of their outsized images of the possible.   

It is nearly impossible to conceive of a more intractable conflict than that which perpetually wracks the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The myriad Khartoum-inspired nightmares in the Sudan come close, as does the stateless chaos in Somalia. But for a textbook case of genocidal early colonialism, general colonial misrule, Big Man Cold War clientelism, post-Cold War teetering Big Man ruthlessness, and post-Big Man anarchy, go to Congo-Kinshasa.

Fighting in and around Goma continues apace even as African, Western, and United Nations leaders meet in Nairobi to try to address the crisis. At least twenty civilians have been killed in the latest round of fighting, which threatens to revive full-fledged civil war and international instability in the most unstable region on the continent. And the most frustrating aspect of the escalating conflict is that as with any tragedy, we can see it coming and have no idea how to stop it.

The so-called Shikota Movement of ANC dissidents met this past weekend to continue the process of forming a new political party, the South African Democratic Congress, or Congress of the People. The end result was an announcement that the new party will launch officially on December 16, South Africa’s Day or Reconciliation (and once the Afrikaners’ Day of the Vow) and that it plans to contest the 2009 elections.

Jacob Zuma, who still likely stands to lose the most from the challenge of the dissident party, dismisses its members as “bigamists.”  Just as the Polokwane conference in December 2007 guaranteed  that 2008 would be among the most lively and contentious on record in South African politics, so too does the formation of the new dissident party with their promise to challenge the ANC promise that 2009 will be a contentious one.

It is quite clear that the misery of Zimbabweans has not provided much impetus to push the negotiations forward in Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe has not much cared about the suffering of his citizenry over the course of the last decade and more. There is no reason to believe he would start now. And let there be no question about it — Mugabe’s obstinacy is the key impediment at work in thwarting successful negotiations, negotiations he never expected to have to endure and that he certainly never desired.

So is it possible that outside pressure, which has been intermittent at best, will come to bear in Zimbabwe? With Thabo Mbeki’s brokering of discussions there was at least the pretense of progress. Is it possible that various forms of pressure from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), or from individual SADC members, such as Botswana, which has called for new elections in Zimbabwe, or a newly configured South African negotiation team, might prove effective? Signs are that South Africa is growing frustrated with the glacial pace of talks. And Jacob Zuma is less indulgent of Mugabe than was Thabo Mbeki to begin with.

Pressure is almost certainly going to have to come from without to get the talks going again. because there is almost no sense within Zimbabwe that Mugabe has any interest whatsoever in yielding power beyond te miniscule steps he has already taken.

Forgive the light posting of late. Between traveling a great deal lately and obsessing about the historic American presidential election there simply has been little time. Hopefully it is not too untoward to declare that I celebrate Barack Obama’s epochal victory much as Nelson Mandela does.

Cote D’Ivoire is supposed to have a long-awaited presidential election this year. Elections are, of course, a crucial marker on the way to true liberal democracy in Africa and anywehere. But human rights observers have increasingly expressed concerns that rushing to have an election just for the sake of having an election might prove to do more harm than good.