Over the years, it has become very clear that South Africa is the worst mediator on the continent.
From former President Thabo Mbeki to incumbent Jacob Zuma, and a few technocrats in between, South Africa has not had any success with its foreign policy and mediation efforts simply because it is African National Congress foreign policy not national policy.
And ANC policies are formed around useless old camaraderieships with discredited and brutal former liberation war political parties elsewhere.
Unlike South Africa, which was liberated by sanctions and merciful negotiations, countries like Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique liberated themselves through sheer military engagements with the “enemy” while the South Africans, including the ANC, were busy necklacing each other in the townships.
Thus, the ANC is eager to be considered a liberation war political party and is always siding with dictators who came to power through force of arms.
Africa must watch very closely what South Africa is doing on the continent and make sure that this country of incompetent bumblers of the African National Congress does not continue with their greedy forays into fellow African states the way they are doing.
Having dismally failed at mediation and negotiation, South Africa has now turned to ‘clandestine’ military escapades to assist South African business, which has been having a hard time since independence.
It did not, therefore, come as a surprise when South Africa was caught with its hand in the cookie jar in the Central Africa Republic, claiming that South African soldiers had been deployed there on national duty to train military personnel and keep some semblance of order.
We have seen all this before and we are not as stupid as the greedy ANC moguls think we are.
A HYPERLINK “http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2002/n0262179.pdf” “Final report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo” issued by the United Nations, (UN Doc: S/2002/1146, 16 October 2002), named current Zimbabwe Defense Minister Emerson Mnangagwa, the late Zim General Vitalis Zvinavashe and many others as some of the people who had cases to answer following alleged massive exploitation of the DR Congo.
The UN panel of investigators recommended the imposition of travel bans on the individuals and a freeze on their personal assets.
Several countries had jumped into the raging DR Congo war on one side or other and the report charged that Congolese and Zimbabwean Government and military officials had transferred the ownership of at least $5bn in assets from the DR Congo mining sector to private companies “with no compensation or benefit for the state treasury”. (‘Mining sector assets’ is, perhaps, diplomatic terminology for diamonds, gold and other minerals.)
The BBC reported then that Zimbabwean officials claimed that their contracts were legal payment for troops, which supported the Kinshasa government.
There was absolutely no reason for the presence of Zimbabwean military personnel in the DR Congo conflict unless we factor in the use of the national army to acquire and protect ‘mining sector assets’ belonging to high-ranking individuals in the army, in government and in the ruling party.
ANC moguls are doing precisely the same elsewhere in Africa and it just happened that the overthrow of an unpopular leader in the CAR unwittingly exposed the use of the national army to protect assets belonging to individuals.
Briefing the parliamentary joint standing committee on defence, South African Defence Minister, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, stated that the only “assets South African troops were in the CAR to protect were some military equipment”.
She was quoted as saying that “the only reason the 400 additional troops were sent to the CAR in January this year was that they knew things were getting sticky in the country, and they needed to protect the 26 troops who were already there, and their equipment”.
Meanwhile, another relic from the past, Frank Chikane, has written a book claiming that former South African president Thabo Mbeki’s mediation prevented Zimbabwe from descending into civil war.
Chikane, a former director-general of the SA presidency, was too modest to mention that Mbeki is the one person who destroyed any possibility of peace in Zimbabwe with his biased mediation, which was so ineffective he had to hide behind calling it “quiet diplomacy”.
If Chikane and South Africa itself think that what is happening in Zimbabwe today is a sign of successful mediation on their part then they need to have their heads examined.
Like South Africa then and now, they always intervene on the side of the perpetrator and abuser of citizens in other countries. When they mediate, as we saw in Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, they fool the world into believing in neutrality while they quietly support a sitting dictator like they are doing in Zimbabwe.
That useless appendage called the Africa Union surprisingly picked Mbeki to mediate in the Ivorian dispute after Mbeki had failed dismally in Zimbabwe.
The Ivorians would not take any nonsense and fired Mbeki for taking sides with the offending dictator during mediation. Mbeki was recalled from the presidency by his own party.
Now, having installed his former wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, as the chair of the African Union, South Africa is bulling African countries by massing troops in DR Congo and in Uganda. This after sending its troops in CAR without the knowledge or concurrence of the regional body, the Economic Community of Central African States.
South Africa is never an impartial mediator and cannot protect any African country.
What did it do to quell political problems in Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and DR Congo??But it can send troops out of the region “to protect democratically elected leaders” elsewhere.
This is the same South Africa that watches and fails to influence positive change in countries inside its borders and the region.
The same South Africa that harbours convicted murderers from other countries and refuses to extradite them back to face justice.
The same South Africa that tells its men to turn around, bend over and let other men do to them what the politicians are doing to the country.
South Africa is trespassing around the continent, imposing a warped foreign policy based on meaningless, old camaraderieships at the expense of the younger generation and of new political dispensations and realities.
South Africa must stay home and behave itself like all good neighbours should do.
