Zimbabwean police dispersing people at an intersection in Chitungwiza in August 2023, to prevent what they considered an illegal gathering. (Zinyange Auntony / AFP)
South Africa’s ambivalence about the civil turmoil in Zimbabwe threatens to undercut the diplomatic plaudits it earned from taking on Israel at the International Court of Justice.
This weekend, President Cyril Ramaphosa and International Relations and Cooperation Minister Ronald Lamola will attend the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Harare. Their motorcade will pass streets that have allegedly been purged of protesters by Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
Troubling reports have ratcheted up in the past two months about the state’s critics and political opponents being thrown into jail for dissent. In the words of Human Rights Watch, the government has spent the lead up to the summit “accelerating its crackdown against legitimate and peaceful activism ahead of the August summit”.
This week, the international relations department shot down a call from the Democratic Alliance to move the SADC meeting, insisting it has no authority to make the demand. Activists’ issues, it said, “can be resolved by sitting around the table”.
That evasion betrays pro-democracy efforts across the border and brings the country’s foreign policy objectives into question.
Many South Africans welled up with pride when they saw their leaders earlier this year in Switzerland battling Israel on the legality of its invasion of Gaza. Opponents of the International Court of Justice mission were eager to highlight the hypocrisy, that it betrayed the staunch non-aligned stance adopted in the wake of Russia’s war with Ukraine. But the government could reasonably counter that in both cases it refused to be cowed by international pressure and had acted on well-thought out, self-determined reasons.
That moral standing crumbles when rested against the hollow pretexts for remaining silent on Zimbabwean repression.
Freedom of speech and demonstration are core tenets of who we are – our diverse nation is united by the belief that they are inalienable. Protest is part of the fabric of our democratic DNA.
A country beholden to those ideals must – at the very least – publicly condemn the silencing of activists and political opponents. Bureaucratic platitudes will only further breed impunity, a resource that has always flourished around the seats of power in Harare.
South Africa regrettably has a long history of not only turning a blind eye to the abuses of its neighbour, but actively keeping them secret. Former presidents Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma all battled to keep the Khampepe report from the public domain. It took a five-year fight for Mail & Guardian lawyers to get a favourable outcome through the Constitutional Court who ordered its release. The documents would show that the 2002 Zimbabwean elections – held 12 years earlier at that point – were not “free and fair”.
That episode, and his overall silence on the Robert Mugabe regime, has irrevocably tarred Mbeki’s legacy, in particular.
President Cyril Ramaphosa would be wise to walk towards the right side of history.