May 3rd, 2007
Pundits, many of whom are so new to focusing on Africa that they could not have identified Pretoria and Harare on a map before Zimbabwe exploded onto the news cycle, have been quick and stern in their condemnations of South Africa for its seeming indifference to the suffering going on north of the Limpopo River. But if we are rightfully going to acknowledge South Africa's deficiencies in addressing the Zimbabwe situation, and the tyranny of that country's President Robert Mugabe, let us also acknowledge that South Africa has the most daunting foreign policy role in all of Africa.
South Africa is, often by default, expected to be the continent's superpower and its gateway to the rest of the world, not least by other African nations. Yet many African countries are at best ambivalent about South Africa's claim to that role. When countries to the north look at South Africa they as often see a threat to their autonomy as they do a beneficent partner. Such is the lot of a regional superpower, even one that shares many of the problems and crises of the rest of the continent. Events in April reveal the treacherous path South Africa has to travel in its relations with the rest of the continent.
Thabo Mbeki spent nearly a week mid- month in Sudan hoping to help broker a deal there that will finally bring an end, or at least an abeyance, to the suffering in Darfur. And it does look as if outside pressure is going to compel Khartoum to yield to a greater peacekeeping presence in the country. Mbeki is confident that Sudan's government will follow through with its commitments.
But we have been down this road before. The world, with the United States sometimes in the lead, either pressures or hints at pressure to come, and Sudan's President, the Machiavellian Omar al Bashir, deftly yields for the briefest of moments. The world exhales, feeling that it has finally put an end to a crisis it has never really understood and certainly has not wanted to address, and within days and sometimes hours, Khartoum returns to its perfidy, as defiant as ever. The leaders of Sudan take a cynical approach to Darfur because the rest of the world has shown that such cynicism will go unpunished. It may well be the same this time around, but if not, Thabo Mbeki, target for so much blame and ire, will deserve a sizable hunk of credit for his role in compelling change from the tyrants in Khartoum.
South Africa's status as the most powerful country on the continent means that there will be no shortage of crises where it might choose or feel compelled to intervene. As Mbeki has seen with Zimbabwe, choosing not to intervene comes at a cost when the rest of the world zeroes in on the once-ignored conflict and identifies it as one of the world's most dire.
It is unlikely, however, that the international community will choose to focus on increasingly authoritarian Swaziland, South Africa's tiny neighbor to the east as it has on Zimbabwe or Sudan, but recent goings on in the Swazi kingdom might well give Mbeki another crisis to address or elide. In mid-April six members of a banned opposition party, the People's United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), were arrested as pro-democracy activists picketed the country's western border posts with South Africa. King Mswati III not only holds an anachronistic title, he also maintains his own version of the Big Man rule that has plagued the continent. The Swaziland protests marked and condemned the anniversary of a royal decree in 1973 by Mswati III's father, King Sobhuza, which more or less banned all political opposition.
As if proximity to the Swazi crisis is not enough of a problem for South Africa, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), part of the ANC alliance that governs South Africa, participated in the Swazi protests, gathering on the South African side of all five of the border posts with Swaziland. Presumably COSATU will have the ability to pressure Mbeki to act, even if only symbolically, against the oppressiveness of Mswati's monarchy. As tensions rise in Swaziland, Pretoria will be forced to keep an eye on its neighbor, especially if domestic politics become a factor, which they will – the ANC will hold its National General Council in June, at which it will heatedly discuss organizational and political issues facing the party as it struggles to determine who will succeed Mbeki as party and state president.
And Zimbabwe continues to fester. South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper (which has been, suffice it to say, no apologist for Mbeki for his handling of Zim or for just about anything else) has produced a special report on Zimbabwe that reveals the crisis in all of its depths, but that also shows the difficulties that South Africa faces as a regional broker. Indeed, another recent M&G article points out that for all of the gnashing of teeth and pointing of fingers toward Mbeki and South Africa with regard to his apparent unwillingness to engage Mugabe aggressively, South Africa "faces an uphill battle" in dealing with its neighbor to the north. By now the two sides are deeply distrustful of one another, and short of force, it is difficult to tell precisely what power South Africa might have to impel Mugabe to change especially since the far more powerful British and Americans have not been able to force the despotic leader to budge.
Two other crises on the continent serve to reveal the limitations of South Africa's expanding role as a regional power broker. Nigeria has recently held nationwide elections that were largely characterized by intimidation, violence, fraud, and anarchy. Meanwhile, Somalia has descended into a state of virtual civil war as the result of an Islamist attempt to overthrow the government. In both cases South Africa has been a minor player.
Part of the explanation for the relative silence is that West Africa and the Horn of East Africa are far removed from South Africa's ambit and have not drawn the sustained international coverage that Sudan has. A more plausible explanation for the lack of South African involvement on these issues, however, is that beyond the power of persuasion it is tough to envision what Pretoria could achieve in taking an active role. It is unwise for even the most powerful nations to intervene when intervention might prove ineffective or worse. In the case of a regional power, failure is surely worse than inaction.
Another reason South Africa may not be inclined to venture forward on its own is that the country currently enjoys the international status accorded to a member of the United Nations Security Council. South Africa now has the capacity to act on the international stage within the rarefied air of the UN and it is likely that the country realizes that, now more than ever, it cannot act unilaterally outside its own sphere of influence. In an era in which some see the globe's greatest power engaged in the equivalent of imperial overreach, South Africa is surely wary of acting without a guarantee of success and the imprimatur of international approval.
South Africa is far from a disengaged or isolationist power. It has a role to play on the continent, a bigger role than any other nation in Africa and arguably in the world, and it continues to try to play that role, a fact that ought not to be lost amidst the recriminations over Zimbabwe. But power has its limitations, as recent events have shown. We can wish that South Africa would do more, or that it would do better. But we cannot sit back and simply dismiss South Africa for its perceived shortcomings, nor can we pretend that South Africa is anything but the most important broker in a region that desperately needs one.