Patrick Bond asks why South Africa has not taken a stronger hand in Zimbabwe.

In 1976, Ian Smith was summoned to meet John Vorster and Henry Kissinger in Pretoria. In an uncomfortable encounter, the Rhodesian prime minister was told by the South African premier and the US Secretary of State that his dream of delaying black majority rule in Zimbabwe for ‘a thousand years’ was over. Accommodation with the liberation movements would be necessary, both for the sake of the West’s legitimacy in the struggle against the USSR and simply because Smith’s position – defending legalised racial domination by 250 000 white settlers against more than six million indigenous black people – was untenable.

Smith resisted the inevitable with a mix of ineffectual concessions and heightened repression, but the power that South Africa held over imports and exports was decisive. Simultaneously, guerrilla war intensified and Smith could no longer count on Pretoria’s military backing. Three years after the ultimatum from Vorster and Kissinger, Smith and his conservative black allies were forced to London to the Lancaster House negotiating table, where Zimbabwe was born. Thanks to what Smith terms “The Great Betrayal” by South Africa and Britain, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) and its allies laid down their arms and swept the first democratic election in February 1980.

A quarter of a century after that fateful meeting in Pretoria, there appeared an analogous moment of truth. Again, millions of black Zimbabweans suffered the depredations of an undemocratic, exploitative ruling elite. Again, a repressive state served the class interests of a few tens of thousands of well-connected bureaucrats, military and paramilitary leaders and what are disparagingly termed ‘briefcase businessmen,’ in the context of unprecedented economic crisis.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the opposition consisted of a formidable political front of two parties – which, although banned and beset by infighting, were strong enough to prevent a yes vote for Britain’s Pearce Commission in 1972 and the sell-out deal that Smith was forced to offer in 1978. The social base of the party was a nationalist unification of peasants, the urban poor and workers and the black petit-bourgeoisie. During the late 1990s, a formidable opposition party – the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) – was built upon the urban poor and workers, a portion of the professional black petit-bourgeoisie and wealthy whites: liberals, farmers and business managers/owners.

In South Africa, meanwhile, it was not difficult to posit a similar trajectory of post-apartheid material decline, ruling-party political illegitimacy and ascendant opposition; the rand crashed by more than 50% over a two-year period and trade union critiques of neoliberal policies hardened. A May 2001 visit to Pretoria by US Secretary of State, Colin Powell – a Kissinger protege in many respects – was evidence of the Republican Party rulers’ need to raise their own questionable international standing through at least one successful African democratisation project.

Mbeki, Mugabe and Nepad
In this context of striking parallels, South African president, Thabo Mbeki, took advantage of the temporary Western goodwill he enjoyed – aside from doubts about his HIV/AIDS policies – to offset the overall hemorrhaging of his country and continent. He established a geopolitical and economic project that came to be known as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad). As with South African interventions in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organisation (WTO) and a host of other international fora, Nepad was quickly praised by neoliberals and corporate intellectuals.

The fly in the ointment, inevitably, would be Robert Mugabe. Aside from his disregard for good governance, Mugabe had come to emblematise the irresponsible African populist. During the late 1990s, he imposed a 100% luxury goods import tax, captured hard-currency accounts kept by wealthy Zimbabweans who prospered during the 1990s era of structural adjustment, defaulted on debt to the World Bank/IMF and African Development Bank, lowered the real (after inflation) interest rate from high positive levels during the 1990s to an amazing -85% in 2001 and kept a currency peg in place at artificially high levels. And yet, these all followed a period of structural adjustment (1991-95) that won the World Bank’s highest-possible evaluation in a 1995 report. In reality, the early 1990s witnessed the de-industrialisation of Zimbabwe’s economy, the crash of the social wage and such a dramatic increase in foreign credit that, by 1998, only Brazil and Burundi paid higher shares of their export earnings to service their debt than Zimbabwe.

Institute for Global Dialogue associate, Rok Ajulu, issued an analysis in October 2001 that pinpointed neoliberalism’s false claims:

Authoritarian governance has, over the last decade, been exacerbated by the impact of globalisation and attendant market fundamentalism, namely, the idea that economic justice must be reduced to equality of opportunity and expressed through the market. The contemporary march of capital all over the world in search of consumers and markets has visited devastation in many countries. While on the one hand, economic globalisation has unleashed productive forces throughout the world, on the other it has engendered fragmentation and marginalisation. This has inevitably led to a declining resource base, triggering unmitigated contestation and conflicts over control of resources. Not surprisingly, the contemporary era of globalisation has been marked by fratricideal wars all over the continent.
Zimbabwe has been no exception, and it is against this background that the current crisis must be understood. At a broader level, the Zimbabwe crisis raises a much more fundamental and critical question and that is: how do countries at the marginal pole of the global economy engage the forces of globalisation, and what implications do such strategies suggest for democratic governance?...
The so-called ‘Zimbabwe Crisis’ is essentially the failure of a kleptocratic elite to respond constructively to generalised economic crisis.

A different conclusion was drawn in Pretoria. The day after formally launching Nepad in Abuja on 23 October, 2001, Thabo Mbeki returned to Cape Town and was confronted in parliament. Mugabe’s throw-away line the previous weekend, at the funeral of a liberation hero, that Zimbabwe would now ditch structural adjustment and “return to socialism”, prompted a comment from the foreign affairs spokesperson of the then-opposition New National Party:
Boy Geldenhuys:
My question to the honourable President is, in your view sir, Zimbabwe’s announced return to socialism – What impact will that have on the New African Initiative?
Thabo Mbeki: I have a bit of a problem with regard to this, Madam Speaker, because unlike the Honourable Member, I do not know what is meant by socialism in this particular context and therefore have no way of measuring what its impact would be on these processes that we are dealing with, with regard to the African continent. If I knew a bit more, perhaps as much as he knows about this matter, I might be able to comment on this.

Just as evasively, Mbeki told the British television show Hard Talk in mid-2001 that he had tried persuading Mugabe to reform, but that the Zimbabwean ruler “didn’t listen to me”. By November, Mbeki publicly attributed Zimbabwe’s problems to “twenty years of economic policies”. Likewise, the African National Congress (ANC) presidential spokesperson, Smuts Ngonyama, blamed the Zimbabwean economic mess on too many “subsidies”. During a tour of the Northern Province, not far from the Beitbridge border with Zimbabwe, Deputy President, Jacob Zuma said that: “President Robert Mugabe’s government embarked on a huge social spending spree without analysing social needs, which caused inflation to spiral”.

Mugabe’s “huge social spending spree” was, in reality, a brief two-year period of rising education and health expenditure, followed by systematic cutbacks and deprivation under IMF and World Bank guidance. The social wage of ordinary Zimbabwean workers fell dramatically, especially after structural adjustment was introduced in 1991 and the economy went into a tailspin.

Lessons
To misread the Zimbabwe situation so blatantly and self-servingly was not new in Pretoria. Consider the case of former land minister, Derek Hanekom, who used Zimbabwe as a whipping boy in 1997. At that stage, land hunger was causing organic (not war veteran-induced) land invasions and farmworker strikes in several areas of rural Zimbabwe. In November 1997, Mugabe announced that the Land Designation Act would finally be implemented. The spectre of large-scale land reform in Zimbabwe was not welcome in South Africa. It was feared that it would impact negatively on investor confidence at a time when Mbeki’s own Washington-centric structural adjustment programme – the misnamed Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy – was already failing noticeably. Hanekom clarified that, unlike Zimbabwe, South Africa was proceeding with land reform on a willing-seller/willing-buyer basis. No white South African farmer need fear the breakdown of rural law and order, as was beginning in Zimbabwe. Of course, nor would black South African farmers gain access to land stolen from them in living memory, given Hanekom’s emphatic endorsement of the same World Bank strategy that had failed so miserably to redistribute land in Zimbabwe.

Hanekom’s political mandate, in the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), was to redistribute 30% of the good land within the first five years. By using a willing-seller/willing-buyer approach topped up with a small grant and rural credit, Hanekom virtually copied the Zimbabwe Lancaster House model intact. He used the same World Bank economist (Robert Christiansen) who insisted that Mugabe continue substituting credit programmes for genuine land reform as his policy advisor.

Because there were practically no black, small-scale farmers who could use the tiny
R16 000 state grant to acquire land individually, and because the few cases where farmers grouped their subsidies together were not given sufficient state support and mainly failed, Hanekom’s record of land redistribution was less than 1% after five years. He was demoted to back-bench MP in 1999.

‘Constructive engagement’
South African schizophrenia in relation to Zimbabwe thus has several features. In early 2000, as Mugabe appeared to have squandered both political popularity and the legitimacy to govern, the ANC leadership must have looked north and observed the following:

If all such bullets were fired in Zambia a decade earlier, and if all but the last bullet were also loaded in South Africa, then it was logical for ANC leaders to look out from their headquarters at Albert Luthuli House in Johannesburg and panic. Two options emerged: hunker down and mindlessly defend the Zanu-PF government against its critics; or move into a ‘constructive-engagement’ mode that might serve as the basis for an ‘honest-broker’ role on some future deal-making occasion. A third option – actively support for Zimbabwe’s social-justice movements, perhaps through sanctions or other pressure techniques, so as to ensure Mugabe authorised genuinely free and fair elections – presumably did not warrant attention, for fear that the last bullet would inspire South African trade unionists to do the same in the near future.

The ANC leadership moved from the first to the second strategy. Attempts during 2000 by ANC parliamentary leader, Tony Yengeni, ANC Secretary-General, Kgalema Motlanthe, and other nationalist ideologues to stitch together the “Old Boys of Southern African” liberation movements in a regional grouping and Yengeni’s own June 2000 parliamentary electoral observation mission – characterised by blatant pro-Zanu-PF utterances – came to naught.

Finally, reality crept up on Pretoria. The key incident that apparently facilitated the move was the overreach by war veterans in April 2001, when they started occupations not simply of white Zimbabweans’ rural farms, but of white South Africans’ Harare factories.

Business pressure, combined with increasingly shrill anti-Zimbabwe rhetoric from white opposition leaders, Marthinus van Schalkwyk and Tony Leon, had to be factored into the South African domestic political situation. But even if Pretoria’s interests were innocent of such elements, the mid-1990s Nigerian lesson – ‘We got our fingers burned’ – was instructive to senior bureaucrats. After talking tough to the Abacha military regime, South African officials believed that Western countries would crack down with sanctions (especially oil imports from Nigeria). They didn’t, leaving Pretoria exposed and ineffective. Another lesson was more current: when Zambia and Madagascar conducted profoundly flawed elections in December 2001, leading to active civil-society and party-political protests, the West and Pretoria quickly accepted prevailing power relations.
Together, these factors make it difficult to ask forthrightly, “What are South Africa’s national interests?” For Mbeki and his staff, the immediate interests pale before the scenario of chaos that loomed as a distinct possibility on the eve of the March 2002 election. As this article was sent to press, it appeared certain that Zanu-PF would steal the election, leaving virtually the entire Pretoria/Johannesburg establishment flumoxed.

Sanctions?
Last year, the MDC finally announced support for the idea of limited ‘smart sanctions’ against Mugabe and his top cronies, mainly taking the form of travel bans and the seizure of foreign-based personal assets (property and bank accounts) owned by Zanu-PF’s leaders. More wide-ranging sanctions could be easily applied by South Africa – for example, the parastatal, Eskom, could refuse to supply electricity to Zimbabwe’s national grid, or the Amalgamated Banks of South Africa could refuse trade credits. A ban on traffic at the crucial Limpopo River border crossing would most directly penalise the white business elites whose financial backing the MDC continued to require.
Unfortunately, mass-based organisations in Zimbabwe and elsewhere rarely, if ever, discussed the issue of sanctions and other forms of international solidarity. The Zimbabweans failed to make a coherent call for support, similar to the ANC and United Democratic Front’s 1980s-era anti-apartheid campaign. Without such a campaign, and given his opposition’s reactionary bedfellows, few progressive South Africans felt compelled to protest Mugabe. On the contrary, many South African workers and urban poor residents are guilty of the vicious xenophobia that often results in the murder of immigrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and the rest of the continent.

Pretoria’s self-perceived interests remained fluid. Mbeki’s spokesperson, Bheki Khumalo, told the press in December 2001:
We as a government are opposed to any form of sanctions against Zimbabwe. What we can only do and will do is engage with Zimbabwe in the context of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Task Force, of the Commonwealth initiative, as well as government to government as well as party contacts.9As the elections grew near and the EU and US imposed sanctions, Pretoria remained stubborn. After Zimbabwe Defence Force leader, Vitalis Zvinavashe and a junta-in-waiting declared their unwillingness to serve a Tsvangirai government in January 2002, Tsvangirai said that:
The threat to undermine the elections by the military, by President Mugabe himself, should actually send shock waves to South Africa and say, under those circumstances, we are going to cut fuel, we are going to cut transport links. Those kind of measures, even if they are implemented at a low level, send the right signals.

South African Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, Aziz Pahad, quickly dismissed the request to turn his failing ‘quietly-quietly’ strategy into more concrete solidarity: “We’ve been working at this for a long time, trying to convince (people), that what is called (for is) quiet diplomacy. Calls for sanctions are misplaced’.11 Pahad was a vociferous international proponent of anti-apartheid sanctions.

There was a danger that Mugabe would use sanctions as an excuse for his own economic mismanagement. Sanctions would mainly disrupt the white-owned business sector, which supported the MDC financially and employed most of its core working-class loyalists. However, at some stage in a struggle for political justice, people have to decide what kinds of pressure points they are willing to ask others to impose upon their enemy, even if they are affected. Did Tsvangirai’s call for South African sanctions reflect a fully-fledged debate amongst Zimbabwean democrats (or even amongst MDC leaders)? Was the decision arrived at through as much reflection and consensus as is probably required? Apparently not, yet the need for the MDC to ratchet up the pressure was obvious, especially in the event that Mugabe clung to power.

Mugabe’s durability
Largely because of Mbeki’s lethargy, it was obvious by early 2002 that the international effort to arm twist Mugabe was going nowhere. The SADC, led by Malawian president, Bakili Muluzi, repeatedly soft-peddled Zimbabwe’s problems. The Commonwealth’s observer missions also failed to send sufficiently stern warnings, although discussion began about the possibility of Zimbabwe being suspended or expelled, as were Sierra Leone, Pakistan and Nigeria in recent years. The highly-publicised September 2001 Abuja Agreement with the Commonwealth to end farm invasions in exchange for more funding was a damp squib, due to ongoing rural violence and land seizures. The various international human rights groups active on Zimbabwe – Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group – made little impact. In Washington, the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act passed by Congress in December 2001 was mainly symbolic, although it raised expectations that an MDC victory would lead to an aid/loan bonanza.

In short, a top-down, elite-reformist gambit in Zimbabwe was doomed to fail. At the time of the election, there was very little prospect of a transitional government of national unity, as Britain told Pretoria it wanted. Following another British proposal, Pretoria’s main hope seemed to be Zanu-PF retaining power but replacing Mugabe. But thanks to Mugabe’s effective destruction of opposition within the ruling party, this prospect was extremely dim. Signalling that Mugabe and his closest aides would not co-operate with Mbeki, the government-controlled Herald newspaper printed a December 2001 editorial that was frustrated to the point of paranoia:
A clear pattern is now emerging of a build up against Zimbabwe and South Africa’s complicity in the plot to overthrow the ruling Zanu government from power. What is even worse and a bit sickening is how President Mbeki is reported to be in the same bed with the same architects of apartheid... President Mbeki’s alleged utterances neatly dovetail into Britain’s grand plan for a global coalition against Zimbabwe similar to the one adopted by America in its fight against terrorism in Afghanistan.

The dilemma
What do these observations tell us about Pretoria’s Zimbabwe dilemma? The parallels between the vicious outbursts of Mugabe’s dictatorial regime and the demise of Rhodesian colonialism during the late 1970s are striking. In both cases, the South Africans have a strong hand given Zimbabwe’s desperation and dependency – although instead of crucial military supplies serving as the key potential lever as in the 1970s (China is Mugabe’s preferred supplier today), Pretoria now wields more control through Eskom’s electricity switch.

Like John Vorster, Thabo Mbeki certainly does not want a fully-fledged opposition victory. The successes of post-nationalist labour-led parties in Zambia, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Botswana strike fear within the ANC.

There is, however, a larger and longer trajectory to consider. Vorster, Kissinger and ultimately the British managers of Zimbabwe’s transition together hoped for a typical neocolonial solution, in which property rights would be the foundation of a new constitution, willing-seller/willing-buyer land policy would allow rural social relations to be undisturbed and nationalisation of productive economic activity would be kept to a minimum. A black government would, moreover, have greater capacity to quell labour unrest, strikes and other challenges to law and order. If a new black consuming class was to be built, it was to occur primarily through an expanded civil service rather than via an assault on those who retained economic power. Traditional modes of patriarchy would remain intact, in no small part to ensure the ongoing reproduction of labour at a very low cost. A foreign debt load would soon crush any inklings of future economic autonomy. Intensification of the inherited export-led bias would ensure the steady supply of raw materials at ever-lower prices.

At a time when Africa is increasingly marginalised by globalisation, Pretoria’s contemporary perspective, instead of neocolonialism, is a related version of neoliberal neonationalism (Nepad). While no doubt desiring that Zanu-PF stay in power, Mbeki needed his neighbour to act more politely, to begin repayment on arrears to the Bretton Woods Institutions (which by late 2001 exceeded US$1 billion), to refrain from torturing journalists and opposition party members and to hold a relatively nonviolent election in March 2002.

Solidarity
There is an obvious, crucial difference between the two epochs: political dynamics associated with genuine popular solidarity. The romance of Southern African liberation struggles made it logical for radical activists across the world to intensify pressure first for the liberation of the colonies. Something more universal has subsequently emerged: North-South unity of progressive activists fighting a common scourge – international neoliberalism. What is most needed, in this new context, is a set of processes that help identify and implement popular solidarity.

And such solidarity still appears, in virtually all settings, to be necessarily based upon civil society connections, in view of the very difficult circumstances associated with the establishment and maintenance of political parties. As one example, what had flowered within the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions in February 1999 as the Working People’s Convention – leading to high expectations of a Workers’ Party13 – quickly degenerated, within a year, into yet another motley post-nationalist, neoliberal political grouping, like so many other second-generation ruling parties. Notwithstanding powerful inputs by International Socialists of Zimbabwe activists (especially MDC member of parliament, Munyaradzi Gwisai) and a small but active support network of radical intellectuals, the MDC’s neoliberal bias disqualified it from the solidarity that had once seemed so obvious. Instead, it would be up to groups like the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Zimbabwe Urban Residents Association, Zimbabwe Council of Churches, and umbrella groups like the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development Civic Alliance for Social and Economic Progress to force the pace of democratic and redistributive change.

What, then, are the strategies for linking activists who seek post-nationalist and post-neoliberal politics? Across Africa, such solidarity is being discussed in relation to concrete and potential linkages between social-justice movements of the North and South. An “African People’s Consensus” campaign was catalysed by Jubilee anti-debt, other church, labour, NGO and community groups in Lusaka in May 1999 and then taken forward at a major Dakar gathering in December 2000 that, for the first time, linked progressive grassroots and shopfloor activists from English, French and Portuguese-speaking areas of Africa. While Thabo Mbeki was gathering international elite forces for Nepad and only later checking in on African capitals, a “Southern African People’s Solidarity Network” headquartered in Cape Town held regular workshops across the region to generate analysis, establish positions and co-ordinate campaigns against neoliberalism and political repression.14 The Africa Social Forum network of social movements met in both Bamako, Mali and Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2002, and denounced Nepad.

Generally these networks of social-justice movements push for ‘deglobalisation’ of their nation-states and for greater regional co-operation, with the aim of re-orienting domestic political economies away from the financial and trade circuitry which has been so disempowering these past two decades. Ultimately a ‘rights-based’ philosophy is emerging that stresses decommodification and destratification in the material sphere, women’s rights and social-environmental harmony. The largest deficits are in the spheres of democracy and basic needs, particularly in relation to rural women, and particularly in areas whose production basis should be easy to expand – rural water/sanitation and small-scale irrigation systems, electricity, public works – without debilitating import requirements. These are probably the orientations associated with national political-economic transformation required for Zimbabwe and other marginalised African countries to prosper. The same would be true for South Africa. The responsibility for taking forward the agenda of social justice under these circumstances rests less with Mugabe, Tsvangirai and Mbeki and more with the social movements who ultimately are the catalysts for progress.