Mbeki and Mugabe

It’s time for Thabo Mbeki to step up to the plate, to decide that for which his administration’s foreign policy is going to stand. According to this article in the Mail and Guardian, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is considering using his nation’s dwindling food supplies as a “political weapon” in the coming elections. Apparently, possessing a Zanu-PF membership card also will allow access to food supplies, whereas membership in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) could mean starvation. Never mind that the main reason for the food paucities in Zimbabwe can be traced directly to Mugabe’s erratic tyranny. Never mind that Mugabe has refused any sort of aid that could alleviate the crisis his people face. Mugabe is effectively using food as yet another means of waging terrorist war on his people. This must be stopped.

But who is going to stop it? Every time the British raise objections, it plays into Mugabe’s tiresome but crudely effective ploy of casting aside all challenges as evocative of the imperialist past. The United States should do a more effective job of, at minimum, voicing concern, but its cries will surely receive the same by now boilerplate response. This is why we should be urging Thabo Mbeki to use every bit of leverage at his disposal to twist Mugabe’s arms. Niceties about “pan-Africanism” and the “African renaissance” aside, Mugabe is clearly an evil enemy to his people. He is a destabilizing force in a region not exactly beset with stability. And from South Africa’s vantage point, a Zimbabwe increasingly thrust into chaos cannot be a good thing. It is time for Mbeki to be a statesman. It is time for him to be a leader. In the next year, there will be another chance to remove Zimbabwe’s cancerous President-for Life from office. For all of its problems, South Africa is still the most powerful nation in sub-Saharan Africa whether measured in political, military, or economic might. If Mbeki, the ANC, or the South African parliament show a willingness to take the lead against Mugabe’s murderous kleptocracy, it will not only solve one of the most seemingly intractable problems on the continent, it also may provide a roadmap for what African diplomacy can be in the future.

Horrifying as it is, Mugabe’s latest cruel gambit provides another opportunity for South Africa to grasp the mantle of leadership that it was afforded when the country threw off the shackles of apartheid. It remains to be seen whether the Rainbow Nation of God will seize the opportunity, or will continue fecklessly to embrace the old canards of African unity that fly in the face of reality on the ground, a reality in which African leaders kill, starve, and steal while the rest of the continent looks away toward an imperial past that, for all of the harm it inflicted, has little to do with the dwindling maize supplies in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and the way he may use them as another cudgel against an already beaten-down people.