During the last few weeks of August and early September 2012 events  and processes – all key indicators of Zimbabwe’s ‘international relations’ – combined to create a ‘perfect storm’ imperilling the country’s fragile inclusive government and posing the possibility of the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) deeper intervention..[1] The Global Political Agreement’s (GPA) ‘road map’ intended to lead Zimbabwe through widely consultative constitutional change and peaceful, free and fair, elections through five years up to 2013 – guaranteed by SADC – while governing co-operatively, was teetering on a precipice created by the confluence of two phenomena blending the local and the global that signify much about ‘international relations’ in today’s Africa.

Firstly, SADC (Southern African Development Community) held one of its regular summits, in Maputo, towards the end of the first week noted above. As usual at these meetings, Zimbabwe’s progress on the ‘road-map’ towards the end of the inclusive government was considered. All preceding the conference seemed well: the members of the three Zimbabwean parties[2] leading the Constitutional Parliamentary Select Committee (COPAC) had signed off their draft for a new constitution based on months and months of public deliberation and reports (and millions of United Nations Development Programme dollars, for those keeping the foreign aid side of international relations in mind): its next steps were to be a second ‘stakeholders’ conference’, a parliamentary report, and a referendum – all before a new election by mid-2013. SADC’s previous meeting in Luanda, in mid-June, had refused Robert Mugabe’s attempt to bypass the ‘road map’ and to call an election earlier than road-mapped. In August, the incoming chair of the SADC ‘troika’, Tanzanian president Jikaya Kikwete, was said to be very critical of ZANU-PF’S efforts to jump the gun. It looked as if the Global Political Agreement was going ahead as planned, albeit at a creaking pace.

However, a seemingly minor event occurred just before the Maputo meeting. When South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma, the SADC-mandated facilitator on all things Zimbabwe, went to Harare to ensure all were heading in the same direction, he refused to meet with Arthur Mutambara, the deposed (but contesting through the courts) leader of the smaller MDC party who remained by Robert Mugabe’s and Morgan Tsvangirai’s sufferance one of the three ‘principals’ at the top of the inclusive government[3]. The next day the rest of SADC confirmed Mutambara’s exclusion from the principals with whom SADC would meet (apparently SADC had made the decision before Zuma’s arrival in Harare). ZANU-PF was almost as furious as the one-time student activist and later robotics professor himself, who stormed in and around both Harare’s Rainbow Hotel where Zuma was meeting the Zimbabwean ‘principals’ and later at the SADC conference in Maputo itself. Professor Jonathan Moyo, one of ZANU-PF’s leading proselytising scribes, wrote that Zuma had “unilaterally install[ed] Welshman Ncube, who is also an in-law [in fact Zuma’s son-in-law] of his, as a GPA principal in a manner that shockingly violated Zimbabwe’s Constitution and sovereignty”[4].  Why would Zuma and SADC depose Mutambara before the Zimbabwean courts did? According to one MDC-T activist, Zuma figured that Ncube’s confirmation as the small MDC’s de facto leader would strengthen Tsvangirai’s hand, because the Matabeleland constituency  had supported Tsvangirai in the past and Ncube needed that support too (Matabeleland being Ncube’s ‘ethnic’ base, but mostly lost in the 2008 election to MDC-T). Mutambara, with no ‘natural’ base in Matabeleland and only a sprinkling of support in any Shona-speaking areas, could only rely on Mugabe for succour. Beholden to the president, Mutambara would support ZANU-PF’s constitutional hi-jacking. One stroke for Zuma?

Zuma may have needed that stroke, because in the weeks before the SADC meeting, ZANU-PF’s Politburo held many late-night meetings reviewing the COPAC constitutional draft that had been released in mid-July, amending all of its restrictions on presidential power among much else.[5] This led to much hand-wringing at the SADC meeting and at home in Zimbabwe: the MDC parties said that all the party’s negotiators signatures on the draft meant finality on the version that would go to the second stakeholders’ conference, and then on to the referendum. As one analyst put it, this was part of ZANU-PF’s plan to “always throw spanners in the works so that a deadlock is declared and we are forced to go to elections without the protection offered by a good constitution”.[6]

Yet as the constitutional conundrum presented itself to the SADC conference, President Zuma departed Maputo to attend to his own rather more shocking crisis: at Lonmin mines in Northwest province, thirty-four striking miners had been shot by the police. Jonathan Moyo was quick to punch the staggering fighter, condemning “trigger-happy  South African police for whose lack of professional restraint was nauseatingly palpable as they unleashed an unnerving volley of gunfire from their state-of-the-art automatic weapons” (sic) and declaring that such actions caused “legitimate and growing public concerns about President Zuma’s leadership or lack thereof [with] wider cross-border implications on matters of the rule of law, constitutionalism, non-violence, accountability and respect for human life among many other related concerns”. If Zuma’s mediation in Zimbabwe was in aid of peace and non-violence, Moyo continued, South Africa’s repression annulled its claim to come to Zimbabwe’s aid: “the integrity of mediation to foster non-violence is credible only when it is done by those who practise what they preach”. [7] Moreover, Moyo asserted that the Zuma regime’s interventions in Zimbabwe were more about negating Mbeki’s legacy than bettering Zimbabwe’s future. These were virulent words indeed: no wonder a few Zimbabwe-South Africa watchers wondered if ZANU-PF had played a role in the fraught miners’ situation south of the border (following, they would say, their support for the deposed ANC Youth League president and continuing gadfly, Julius Malema[8]). Zuma’s facilitation team, led by Ambassador Lindiwe Zulu (her mandate is centred on Zimbabwe and she too has been at the receiving end of much of Moyo’s vitriol) visited Zimbabwe once again, the next week, to attempt to clean up the constitutional mess.[9] By mid-September, MDC-T announced that ZANU-PF had accepted the all-party draft, but it expressed the hope “that SADC and the African Union (AU) and the international must community [sic] supervise and monitor the Second All Stakeholders’ Conference.”[10] One may well guess that South Africa has again exercised influence – and now the MDC-T is upping the stakes with its victory. [11]

In the meantime another rather large spanner had hit the works. A Freedom House and Mass Public Opinion Institute public opinion survey – ‘non-government organisations’ funded for this project by the United States Agency for International Development and thus another manifestation of ‘international relations’ – released on August 20 told an astounded MDC that its support had gone done to twenty from its 2010 figure of thirty-eight per cent. ZANU-PF’s support had gone up to thirty-one per cent[12]. If ZANU-PF trusts the results of this report, it could be emboldened in its battle with SADC and Zuma. SADC’s biggest fear is that ZANU-PF’s election plans include an unconscionable degree of violence, and that SADC would not be able to muster a viable monitoring force to ensure a ‘free and fair’ contest. With Freedom House’s welcome news, ZANU-PF could be likely to create an imbroglio serious enough to call the GPA into question, to cancel it as unworkable, and to call an election – even in the next few months.

If either ZANU-PF or the MDC-T raises the stakes to such an extent that the TIG can be declared unworkable, SADC can wash its hands of its facilitation tasks and take the battle to the African Union. From there, it can go further to the United Nations. Unless all parties agreed to an election – and some international bodies could guarantee their freedom and fairness, international bodies would thus be involved in extending a crisis for another interminable period. Stephen Chan’s forecast that “some form of coalition [is then likely] for years into the Zimbabwean future” could eventuate[13]. Contrary to those who think Africans are not ready for the minimal level of democracy allowed by elections and deserve its continuous deferral,[14] nothing about elite pacts guarantees good governance, let alone creating the conditions for peace and harmony somewhere in the future.  After this most recent of Zimbabwe’s showdowns, its people and their allies across the continent and the world can either take the bull by the horns – or in ZANU-PF’s case the cock by its comb – or resign themselves to another spell of ‘inclusive government’ purgatory.[15]

It is worthwhile in such circumstances to reflect upon missed possibilities in the past. Ironically, the 2001 musings of one of the men who arguably held Zimbabwe’s fate in his hands as it entered its long crisis can help us in that regard: then President Thabo Mbeki wrote a stylised ‘letter’ to Robert Mugabe bemoaning how Zimbabwe’s ‘revolutionary party’ had lost its way: it needed, among much else, a good dose of free and fair elections in 2002 to get it back on track. For some reason, however, it took the South African government under Mbeki, and its regional partners, over seven years to challenge a host of elections that the MDC won but was not allowed to take – and that only after the violence of June 2008 was too much for any neighbour to stomach. This resulted in a GPA that has allowed ZANU-PF to recoup[16].

One may go deeply into theories of international relations to explain this regional democratic deficit – perhaps the issue of ‘sovereignty’, mirage though it is, is too hard to handle for big regional powers fearing the label of ‘sub-imperialist’ and not wanting to challenge the ability of their club-members to rule as they want; maybe the tensions of cross-border class alliances as the process of primitive accumulation goes forth simply don’t allow for democracy’s interference (especially if taken forward by a trade-union based party); possibly regional hegemons may always trump an elusive ‘order’ and stability rather than let new rulers take root with the people; or it could be simply that ZANU-PF statesmen are by far craftier statesmen than South Africa’s to date. Whatever the explanation – and traditional international relations theories only scratch the surface,[17] the disappointments of those who hoped for drastic changes in the post-Mbeki era may indicate that structure is trumping agency even where presidents have quite a degree of autonomy – a few words in 2002 by an extraordinarily powerful neighbour to allow the results of an election to stand could have led to a future no worse than Zimbabwe’s last 12 years.[18] There is a chance that Thabo Mbeki’s successor might amend South Africa’s failures of the past, but it is slight.

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David Moore, trained as a political scientist, is professor of Development Studies and the Head of the Anthropology and Development Studies department at the University of Johannesburg. Norma Kriger, Brian Raftopoulos and he co-edited a special edition of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies entitled ‘“ Progress” in Zimbabwe’ that was published early this year.

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• The Impact of Social Media Hashtags on Human Rights in Zimbabwe
• Closing the Second Cycle in BRICS: A Surprise or Business as Usual?
• Can Zimbabwe Move Beyond the Sanctions Rhetoric?
• Zimbabwe Elections: The Local and Regional Implications
• Exhuming Norms: Comparing Investigations of Forced Disappearances
• When Military Coups d’état Become Acts of Social Justice