That myth about SADC and external salvation? My people, it’s time to let it go
By Ranga Mberi
On Monday, I watched as workmen heave comically large, Korean-esque billboards above the departure entrance of Harare’s RGM International Airport. There he was, Emmerson Mnangagwa, smiling down from above, welcoming one and all to the SADC Summit.
In case any of us forgot who was the next SADC chairman, we have been choked by dusty propaganda from the Cold War era; from radio jingles to cringey headlines.
Seeing the airport banners, I laughed as I remembered a call, back in February, from a friend. We call him “Doc”. Everyone has a friend like Doc — that one PhD who believes stuff that they find in the dimmest corners of the internet.
That day, Doc had hot, breaking news.
“You must be the only one in Jerusalem who doesn’t know,” he said. “SADC has called for fresh elections on 30 June.”
He had received this big news from the most credible of sources – Facebook.
There, a page called “Africa Beautiful or Ruined” had gained a huge following. Why wouldn’t they? They had exclusives from sources inside SADC. The sources were telling them earthshattering news – tired of Zimbabwe’s rigging, regional leaders had ordered a fresh election.
I trawled through the page. There was more. Not only would there be fresh elections, but SADC sanctions: “It has been resolved that Zimbabwe will be excluded from various key SADC processes until the illegitimacy in Harare is resolved.”
At last, hundreds of comments cheered, SADC was finally acting on Zimbabwe. June 30 came and went. And, well, that page has since conveniently disappeared from Facebook. Their job, it seems, is done.
We didn’t bother asking whether SADC can, according to its rules, interfere in the way some wished it would. We lied to ourselves about what the SADC observer report actually said; “SADC has nullified the election, there was no election”, some said.
Launching its Eswatini observer mission last September, SADC wrote: “SADC Electoral Observation Missions ONLY (their emphasis) observes elections. SADC DOES NOT conduct elections in its Member States but observes them. We then make recommendations. Understand the role of SADC when it comes to observing elections. Our mandate is only to observe and issue a report.”
Cages were rattled. Froth was spewed. We raged.
Who can blame us? After all, even our leading scholars had weighed in. Had we not seen Ibbo Mandaza tell Trevor Ncube that he was “in touch with all the governments in the region” and they could reverse Mnangagwa’s inauguration? And our media? They told us that SADC would hold an extraordinary summit on Zimbabwe. Who are we to doubt our esteemed scholars, to side-eye our senior political journalists?
The opposition CCC decided not to challenge the election result in court; there were no “domestic remedies”, the party said, raising supporters’ hopes in a SADC intervention that was always unlikely.
Paranoia, abuse and lies
And then Mnangagwa’s paranoid security forces arrested over a hundred activists. Some were brutally tortured, their wounds paraded as a grim warning to the rest of us. Police shut down bars and restaurants early, even as Mnangagwa invited guests to taste local life, yet another own goal for his clumsy administration.
All this added to our tempers. And so, here we were, yet again, appealing to SADC. Who can blame us? We are led by rulers who genuinely hate their country. So our options are brutally shut down, and we look to “the world” for salvation.
In our desperation, we fed on all sorts of narratives thrown at us. We moved from “SADC to hold fresh” elections, then to “SADC to take summit from Zimbabwe”, then to “SADC leaders to boycott summit”. Then the spokesman of the opposition CCC, Promise Mkwananzi, suggested that SADC leaders had been paid US$500,000 to attend, then we moved to “some leaders didn’t attend”, then to “some leaders left early”. By Sunday, we had settled on “the Summit didn’t matter anyway.”
Influencers who post all this watch and laugh at their followers eat it all up, while Elon rings up their Twitter engagement dollars.
Here is the hard truth; appealing to SADC, or the fabled “international community”, cannot be the number one thing we do. First, these countries have their own interests. Second, look, they aren’t any better. We assume there is a morally superior group of leaders out there to whom we can cry. Sorry. There is no such “world”. No such Commonwealth. Definitely no such SADC.
SADC: A mutual club
My friend Doc had a plan. When SADC leaders meet, he said, we must send an emissary to them with our demands – fresh elections. Well, Doc, here’s how that conversation will go.
First, you will approach Angola’s João Lourenço, who has been SADC chair for the past year.
Elections, you say? After he’s had a good laugh, he will tell us how he won his own election in 2022. The opposition UNITA claimed rigging and went to court. The judges said the Angolan “ZEC” didn’t need to produce result sheets. Activists who complained were detained. SADC said voters “expressed their democratic will”. The US was among the first to congratulate Angola, their key ally. And that was that.
Or maybe we could approach DRC President Felix Tshisekedi. He too had an election in 2023. He will remind us of scenes in which polling stations were invaded and burnt down, how folks grabbed voting machines, smashed them, or ran off with them into the bush. According to SADC, only 2% of polling stations in the DRC election opened on time. The election was supposed to be done in a day, but some were still voting seven days later.
According to the Carter Centre, the election saw “close to 50 deaths, including at least two candidates” and “party agents and observers could not witness the tabulation of results”.
The head of the SADC election observer mission, former Zambian VP Enock Kavindele, couldn’t even bring himself to make a declaration of the election outcome in his interim report. On January 19, SADC posted its “heartfelt congratulations” to Tshisekedi. Oh, and don’t forget Tshisekedi has a whole war in the East of his country to complain about – a war that has displaced seven million people, including around a million in the past year alone. He has a lot to tell SADC leaders about one Paul Kagame.
How about asking Filipe Nyusi, the President of Mozambique? He too knows a thing or two about elections. The most recent were municipal elections last year. Many protested the results, claiming fraud. Mozambican police killed at least seven. Among the victims were 14-year-old Atipo Juma, who was selling maheu on the streets, and 17-year-old Braimo Arlindo, a trader in Nacala, who was chased into a house and shot to death – as he hid next to his father. Opposition offices were raided and dozens were arrested.
In the 2019 elections, Anastacio Matavel, the head of Mozambique’s biggest local observer group, the equivalent of Zimbabwe’s ZESN, was killed – shot 13 times. We would bore Nyusi, anyway. He’s dealing with a whole armed insurgency which has displaced close to a million and killed thousands.
You could appeal to Hakainde Hichilema, the chair of the SADC Organ on Politics who has decided to dial into the conference because of beef with Mnangagwa. He is despised by the rage-filled fringe that dominates the Zimbabwe government, and a favourite of our opposition. He will give you an ear. Just don’t ask him about why he has banned opposition rallies, or ask about the youths being arrested for protesting against 17-hour power cuts.
Samia Suluhu is one of my favourite leaders in SADC. She’s leading Tanzania on a path of progress. She’s incoming chair of the SADC Organ. Last week, she took time off from building trains and roads to arrest opposition leaders Freeman Mbowe and Tundu Lissu and ban their rallies. Some 500 activists have been arrested countrywide, accused of plotting violence.
Don’t even ask Eswatini. The King doesn’t take kindly to commoners. What if the opposition boycott elections and make the president illegitimate, you ask? Well, ask Madagascar’s Andry Rajoelina. He won elections boycotted by the opposition last year, and results of 122 polling stations were destroyed in a fire in recent polls. He is the next SADC chairman.
As for the South Africans, they have more than enough on their plate. Botswana, Namibia and Malawi? They have their own elections soon. They are busy.
On our own, let’s act like it
In the end, dear friend, after you have made your way around the room of SADC leaders, you will realise the unkind fact; much like abused orphans, we can run down the neighbourhood streets, crying to neighbours for help. We have every right to do so, after years of hurt.
What we must not do is to expect neighbours to do anything about it. They cannot. Not only can they not interfere – they are no better. They have their issues to deal with – many of them more dire than ours.
It’s time we let go of our main actor syndrome. We are not the centre of everything. There’s no saviour, in SADC, or beyond.
For now, with the SADC Summit done, our only relief would be to watch those embarrassingly large airport billboards being brought down – the same way we must one day bring down our unhealthy obsession with expecting foreign saviours, and blaming everyone else for our troubles.
Eddison Zvobgo told it best: “We have behaved as if the world owes us a living. It does not. We have blamed other people for each and every ill that befell us. As every peasant, worker, businessman or woman now stares at the precipice of doom, let us wake up and draw back. We must clear the slate, bury everything that has divided us, and begin again.”
And that, my people, and you my friend Doc, is just about that.
NewZWire
