Southern Africa Report (Johannesburg)
9 June 2011
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe goes into Saturday’s extraordinary SADC summit in Johannesburg still battling to overcome the consequences of President Jacob Zuma‘s skilled manoeuvring at Livingstone, Zambia in March (see SAR Vol 29 No 13).
He may have done enough to achieve an honours-even outcome in the battle of public perceptions. But in achieving this he has been forced by Zuma into key practical strategic compromises, not least over the timing of Zimbabwe’s next elections. These will now not take place before March 2012.
The Livingstone meeting of the SADC Troika on Politics, Defence and Security put Mugabe on terms to implement the SADC-approved 2007 Global Political Agreement (GPA), which set up Zimbabwe’s multi-party government. It criticised “all stakeholders to the GPA”, as did the South African report on which it was based, for delays in implementing the agreement. But the thin diplomatic veneer fooled no-one that Mugabe was the target – least of all Mugabe and his Zanu PF party, which has spent the two months since furiously attempting to undo the Livingstone decision.
SADC’s meeting on Livingstone was to have taken place last month (20 May 2011) in Windhoek, Namibia, but was postponed because Zuma, the SADC facilitator on Zimbabwe’s GPA process, was unavailable – he was at home awaiting the outcome of local government elections.
The extraordinary summit has been thus squeezed into busy head-of-state schedules alongside the tripartite free trade area summit at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg on Saturday (11 June 2011) – see Taking the first step elsewhere in this issue.
In the wake of the Livingstone set-back Mugabe recognised – as did traditional SADC allies in Namibia, the DRC and Malawi – that he would have to rapidly implement the GPA’s dozens of outstanding clauses, if he were to head off the Troika insistence on a hands-on SADC (in practice South African) role in creating an environment suitable for internationally-credible elections.
The “inclusive government” has thus completed a raft of GPA requirements, from beginning the process of ending Zanu PF’s monopoly on broadcast media and control of state-owned newspapers to significant progress in drafting a new constitution. The multi-party Constitutional Parliamentary Committee (Copac) expects to have completed revision of a draft constitution by September this year. The constitution is then scheduled to be approved by national referendum, paving the way for national elections.
At last week’s (1 June 2011) Zanu PF politburo meeting in preparation for the SADC summit, Mugabe implicitly acknowledged that, although the party remains committed to elections this year, the time-table for delivery against SADC requirements might mean elections will take place “early next year”.
These are crucial compromises on Zanu PF’s previously immovable insistence on retaining absolute control of the key institutions of state, irrespective of its commitment to SADC to abide by the GPA.
While none of these processes is irreversible, Zanu PF is now more locked into multi-party processes than it has ever been. This is precisely what Zuma and Zambian President Rupia Banda sought to achieve in Livingstone. They are less interested in humiliating Mugabe publicly than in persistently worrying him into taking one apparently small step at a time down the path to internationally-credible elections.
Come Saturday they will therefore be content to allow the aging Zimbabwean president to be seen to be back in SADC’s good graces – possibly even to the extent of softening some of the wording of the Livingstone Troika meeting communiqué – provided the summit allows Zuma to keep the pressure on Mugabe.
The journey to credible elections remains a long one, with key preconditions not addressed. These include a voters’ role that bears little resemblance to Zimbabwe’s adult population – although agreement has been reached on allowing the country’s SADC diaspora to vote for the first time.
But probably the most crucial precondition not yet addressed is control of the armed forces and the police – both still massively partisan and, as demonstrated in during 2008 elections, a major obstacle to free and fair polling.
Security sector reform is vital for Zimbabwe, as is the establishment of impartial military and police. But this is a process not an event, and impractical even in the more leisurely, but less likely, timetable of elections in 2013.
The challenge for the South African facilitators in the months ahead will therefore be to achieve agreement on confinement to barracks of the more aggressively pro-Mugabe military and police special units. A related challenge is the continuing operation of the intelligence and internal security agency, the Central Intelligence Organisation, which accounts to the presidency rather than to parliament, operates under a secret budget, and which maintains a comprehensive national network of informers and agents, including many responsible for maintaining and mobilising Zanu PF militias.
The urgency of a solution to this has been vividly demonstrated in the past three weeks (see Zanu PF turns up the heat elsewhere in this issue).
The immediate challenge, however, is to keep Mugabe on the straight and narrow – and under at least the partial influence of SADC.
Mugabe has been actively lobbying across the region since Livingstone, shoring up wavering support and winning converts. But key influences, notably Defence Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa and several of his generals, have been arguing that Mugabe has lost the hearts-and-minds battle in SADC and that Zanu PF needs to prepare to go it alone.
So far Mugabe has resisted this argument – recognising that alienating his few remaining allies will spell disaster for Zanu PF. But he is not about to surrender power willingly. The months ahead will be challenging for Zuma – currently distracted by his involvement in Libya, persuading another African president to do the decent thing.
AllAfrica – All the Time