allAfrica.com: Africa: Why South Africa Will Never Be Like Zimbabwe (Page 1 of 2)

OUR government's stand on Zimbabwe has once again distressed many South Africans. How can President Thabo Mbeki say there is no crisis in Zimbabwe? He later claimed he was not talking about the social and economic reality but about the elections in Zimbabwe.

But isn't there an electoral crisis?

If this denial were a one-off oversight on President Mbeki's part then it would only be opposition parties here in South Africa and those not in solidarity with the Zimbabwean people who would want to go on making a meal of it.

Unfortunately the denial was part of an entrenched pattern. In his state of the nation address in February Mbeki assured parliament that everything was "on track" in Zimbabwe apart from a "few procedural matters".

This is not to say that absolutely nothing was achieved in the current round of mediation, which managed to edge the Zanu PF government into a half-hearted and belated implementation of some of the agreements reached.

These helped to place a few more tripwires against the dangers of brazen electoral fraud. For instance, results were posted outside polling stations, and for a few

weeks opposition parties had access to rural areas.

But, as several other commentators have remarked, what are we to make of apologists who extol the mediation efforts and point to the access enjoyed by the opposition in this election to areas that had previously been no-go zones?

If they were previously no-go zones, why did our own government and Sadc declare the elections of 2000, 2002 and 2005 sufficiently free and fair? How do we explain this pattern of denial by our government?

Many commentators suggest that it is fundamentally about solidarity between national liberation movements.

This is probably true, but it requires considerable qualification. In the first place, the ANC and Zanu PF hardly enjoyed cordial relations in the decade and a half before Zimbabwe's Independence. The ANC's Zimbabwean ally was Zapu.

MK and Zipra forces fought together in the Wankie (Hwange) and Sipolilo (Guruve) campaigns. After Independence, Zapu's mass base and forces in Matabeleland were dealt a brutal blow in 1983-7 in a scorched earth campaign that left some 20 000 people dead.

A badly mauled Zapu was forced as a junior partner into a "government of national unity".

Notwithstanding all of this, I believe that what informs much of President Mbeki's Zimbabwean strategy is the belief that national liberation movements in our region should close ranks.

This is informed by a conviction that the crisis in Zimbabwe is being used as an entry point by imperialist powers to reassert hegemony over a former colony and eventually over our whole region.

Well, of course, all kinds of forces will seek to exploit the crisis in Zimbabwe, but attributing the crisis itself to imperialism is exactly what Mugabe himself does constantly.

Of course, Mbeki will never say this as stridently as Mugabe. How then would you explain yourself to your various presidential expert panels on investment, IT, and so on, which bristle with chief executives from all of the largest multinationals? Is this perhaps another reason why quiet diplomacy has to be quiet?

For his part, Mugabe blatantly uses the British colonial threat in an entirely demagogic and increasingly futile attempt to distract Zimbabweans from the failures and brutality of his own government.

We are told, for instance, that "land reform" did not succeed because the British failed to meet their financial obligations as agreed in the Lancaster House negotiations.

But what kind of heroic anti-imperialist liberation movement is this? Can you imagine the Cubans arguing two decades after their revolutionary breakthrough that they had not implemented land reform because the US refused to subsidise it?

President Mugabe's demagogic "anti-imperialism" is not an anti-imperialism that seeks to defend the interests of the peasantry, the workers and the progressive professional and middle strata of Zimbabwe's society. It is a pseudo anti-imperialism that seeks to defend the narrow interests of a rentier capitalist elite within Zanu PF and the upper echelons of the state.

It is a stratum that is entirely parasitic on state power. State power is used to pillage for the purposes of primitive accumulation. And remember, much of the recent socio-economic crisis in Zimbabwe dates back to the pillaging "peace mission" to the DRC in the late-1990s, which ended in bankruptcy and defeat for a once professional and proud Zimbabwean army.

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