“From Rhodes to Mbeki: Can SA Become a Credible Champion of Human Rights and Development in Africa?” By Adekeye Adebajo
“Bringing the People Back In” By Adebayo Adedeji
“The AU, Nepad and Mbeki’s ‘Progressive African Agenda’” By Chris Landsberg
“Can SA Resist Playing Bully in its Backyard?” By Khabele Matlosa
“SA’s Economic Expansion into Africa: Neo-colonialism or Development?” By Judi Hudson
“Tarrying on HIV Defers Dream of an African Renaissance” By Angela Ndinga-Muvumba and Shauna Mottiar
“‘Exporting peace’ to the Great Lakes?” By Devon Curtis
“Bridging a Continent: North Africa and the Horn,” By Iqbal Jhazbhay
From Rhodes to Mbeki: Can SA Become a Credible Champion of Human Rights and Development in Africa?
Adekeye Adebajo
The greatest imperialist of the 19th century, Cecil Rhodes, had a dream to establish dominion over Africa from the Cape to Cairo. Rhodes’s heirs—the racist governments in Pretoria—historically saw Africa as an area of penetration, exploitation and destabilisation. This was the Africa of “labour reserves” from which hundreds of thousands of Southern African migrants ventured to South Africa to work in mines, on farms and in industry for a pittance.
This was also the Africa of “brokenbacked” states, as apartheid’s marauding military bombed Mozambique, Angola, Lesotho, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe in a campaign of awesome destructiveness that eventually resulted in a million deaths and about $60-billion in damages in the 1980s. The collective memory of these actions is still fresh in the minds of regional states.
Can a country that has brutalized and exploited its own people, and acted as a regional tsotsi in its backyard, become a credible champion of human rights and development in Africa — even after a remarkable political transformation? To what extent can South Africa play a leadership role in Africa without being tripped up by its historical baggage? How is the country, and its largely white industrialists, perceived on the continent? And how sustainable is the remarkable transformation of South Africa, in a short decade, from being Africa’s greatest destabiliser to its most active peacemaker?
These are some of the pressing questions addressed by the articles in this survey, based on a recently published volume entitled South Africa in Africa: The Post-Apartheid Era and edited by Adekeye Adebajo, Adebayo Adedeji and Chris Landsberg. They provide the socio-economic and political context for understanding South Africa’s foreign policy, on the premise that an effective foreign policy can be built only on a sound domestic foundation. In addition, the
diverse group of pan-African scholars represented here also assesses serious challenges of regional leadership for South Africa.
Historically part of the “white dominions” with Australia, Canada and New Zealand, South Africa’s apartheid governments saw themselves culturally and politically laminated to the West. Hendrik Verwoerd, a South African prime minister and one of the key architects of apartheid, claimed that whites had brought civilisation, economic development, order and education to Africa: South Africa would determine the continent’s destiny. Such patronising cultural arrogance was an intrinsic feature of political thought — from Rhodes, the ruthless diamond magnate and premier of the Cape colony, to FW de Klerk — leaving the black-led governments of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki little choice after 1994 but to engage the region with great humility.
Yet South Africa has made impressive strides since 1994. The country has a Constitution that is widely celebrated around the world. In 2007 the government reported an economic surplus for the first time in the country’s history, even as it announced plans to spend dramatically on social services infrastructure and a new social security system. However, many of the institutions inherited from the apartheid era are still largely intact: the economy, universities, think-tanks and the South African National Defence Force’s (SANDF) officer corps are still white-dominated. Socio-economic inequalities, still continuing largely along racial lines, remain among the highest in the world.
Mbeki has consistently sought multilateral solutions to resolving regional conflicts and skillfully used a strategic partnership with Nigeria to pursue his goals. Chastened by Mandela’s bitter foreign policy experiences over human rights and governance disputes over Nigeria (1995) and Lesotho (1998), Mbeki has been more prepared than Mandela to send peacekeepers abroad, deploying 3,000 troops to Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Mbeki was the first chair of the African Union and the intellectual architect of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad). Under his leadership, South Africa hosted two high-profile UN conferences on racism and sustainable development, gained a two-year seat on the United Nations Security Council and won the right to host the football World Cup in 2010: the first time the event will take place in Africa.
This survey therefore covers key South African initiatives in Southern and North Africa, as well as the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa, in addition to assessing the country’s role in building the AU and Nepad.
South Africa has many elements of “soft power” that it can use more effectively to promote its interests and to win friends in Africa. The supreme irony is that while South Africans might be among the most uninformed people about the rest of Africa, much of Africa’s elite probably know more about South Africa than about any other country on the continent. South Africa can use Channel Africa, which transmits to 33 African countries, to expose Africans further to South Africa and, in turn, to improve the knowledge of South Africans about the rest of Africa.
South African cellphone giants, MTN and Vodacom, could connect the entire continent with their mobile phone network; while South African technology and capital could help build the roads, railways and ports that Africa badly needs for its industrial take-off. The strident corporate expansion of South African firms into the continent is covered in the pages of this supplement, as is the crippling effect of HIV/Aids on the dream of an African renaissance.
South Africa is gradually loosening its protectionist policies, restructuring the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), to offer greater voice and benefits to its other members (Namibia, Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho).
But, despite Mbeki’s efforts to integrate South Africa into the rest of Africa, it is unclear how deeply entrenched these efforts are within South Africa’s political and business elite and citizens. Concerns have been raised in Africa about whether Mbeki’s heirs after 2009 will maintain the same impressive commitment to the continent that he has shown. Cecil Rhodes sought to unite Africa through military force and economic chicanery. Mbeki seeks to unite the continent through more peaceful Pan-African means in pursuit of an “African century”.
We trust that this supplement will further enrich and inform these important debates.
Adekeye Adebajo is executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution at the University of Cape Town
Bringing the People Back In
Adebayo Adedeji
Africa’s ever-recurring armed conflicts and civil wars and the new waves of globalisation in the post-Cold War era have accentuated the marginalisation of a continent so severely that it is now at the periphery of the periphery of the world.
The failure to deconstruct and reconstruct Africa’s inherited colonial economy has exacerbated centuriesold dependence and dispossession. The optimism heralded by the era of political independence since the halcyon days of the 1960s has long since evaporated, even as one sub-Saharan country after another presently celebrates its golden jubilee.
Africa’s most serious mistake has been the separation of politics from economics. In doing so, the discipline of economics has been severed from its origins of political philosophy and ethics and has been robbed of its human dimension. The obsessive concern with growth economics to the detriment of a holistic approach
to sustainable human development has conveyed a heartless message: that people are irrelevant.
Instead, what seems to be important are fine theories and technicalities rather than the combination of the political, social, cultural, psychological and institutional factors. The emergence of the development merchant system (DMS)—with its marabouts, soothsayers and latterday prophets — has replaced humancentred development.
It is sad to admit that the African state as invented by Europeans has neither been deconstructed nor reconstituted. The tragedy is that no serious and comprehensive attempt has been made to address inhibitive anti-development factors.
This is a far cry from the outpouring of optimism that followed news of Nelson Mandela’s release from jail after 27 years of incarceration—relayed on the eve of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa’s (ECA) seminal international conference on popular participation in development and transformation held in Arusha, Tanzania, in February 1990. Participants saw it as a good omen for the realisation of the overarching objectives of the meeting and immediately dispatched messages of congratulations in this sudden climate of expectation.
But, like the 52 other African countries that had become independent before institutional apartheid was transcended in 1994, South Africa, for a variety of reasons, settled for democratic transition rather than radical reconstruction and deconstruction of state and society. The ANC had to surrender the notion of restructuring South Africa’s socioeconomic inequalities and instead embrace the neoliberal orthodoxy.
The now all but forgotten Reconstruction and Development Programme of the early 1990s was floated as the potential panacea to South Africa’s socio-economic
ills. This programme was a social democratic agenda in content and orientation. It was soon, however, superseded by the growth, employment and redistribution programme (Gear), which had economic objectives and conformed with the “Washington Consensus”. Gear’s implicit message was that human-centred development and “good governance” should be subject to the dictates of liberalization and marketisation.
There is no doubt that by opting for Gear, post-apartheid South Africa has demonstrated that it is “just another kid on the block” and, in the wake of the disillusionment with the programme, the concept of a “people’s contract” once again re-entered the South African policy lexicon on the “developmental state”.
The reassertion, by both the ECA and the UN Development Programme in 1990, of the need to return to a holistic human development paradigm is explicitly addressed by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), the initiative unveiled in 2001 by several African governments, led by South Africa.
It is in this context that South Africa’s paradigm of Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (Asgisa) was developed by 2006, specifically in a bid to halve unemployment and poverty by 2014, in line with the UN Millennium Development Goals. Asgisa pins much of its hopes on partnership between business, civil society and labour, with a focus on the micro-economy. The removal of binding constraints—which Asgisa relies heavily on the Reserve Bank and national treasury to facilitate—will be a boost to the production of public goods and services, which provide employment and reduce poverty.
Despite some of the shortcomings of post-apartheid South Africa’s socioeconomic development, since 1990 and, particularly, since May 1994, South Africa has left no one in doubt of its intention to remain within Africa and to play a proactive leadership role. The country has been a constructive participant in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) as well as the Southern African Development Community (SADC), though it has not joined the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa).
Critically though, what South Africa and the rest of Africa need is not just economic growth—important as this is—but holistic human development and a culture of personal and social discipline. Only then will African states be on the road to becoming “rainbow nations of God”.’
Adebayo Adedeji is executive director of the African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies, Nigeria. He was chair of South Africa’s Peer Review Process, and was executive secretary of the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa from 1975 to 1991
The AU, Nepad and Mbeki’s ‘Progressive African Agenda’
Chris Landsberg
South Africa’s attempts in the past eight years to help craft the African “progressive” public policy landscape are closely identified with the “African Agenda”, or African renaissance—the progressive Africanist policies of President Thabo Mbeki and his continental allies.
A primary goal of this “African Agenda” is to integrate the continent into the global economy on the basis of “mutual responsibility” and “mutual accountability”. Mbeki and his allies have therefore sought to persuade a majority of African governments to support their agenda by engaging in “trade-off diplomacy” with the West.
South Africa’s “African Agenda” is an impressive and ambitious plan as it involves a wide range of measures to make democratic political systems, peace and security and accelerated economic growth the cornerstones of development in Africa.
Yet there are concerns throughout the continent about South Africa’s “giantism”. There is fear and resentment of Tshwane behaving like, and harbouring the goals of, a domineering hegemon. There is thus a perception in some quarters that South Africa wants to dominate its region.
It is important that Tshwane monitors these concerns and does not act in ways that reinforce these perceptions. To its credit, it has pushed for multilateral conduct and mechanisms within the African Union (AU), the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
Mbeki has built strategic partnerships with key African leaders—particularly Nigeria’s former president Olusegun Obasanjo, Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Mozambique’s Joaquim Chissano and, more recently, Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete—in coordinating their African foreign policy strategies.
In addition Tshwane has encouraged Africa’s regional economic communities, such as SADC, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) to reform and streamline their work to be consistent with Nepad and the AU.
Fully aware of the central role that the AU—the continent’s premier pan-African institution—must play in political and economic affairs, South Africa, unsurprisingly, took the lead at the Durban summit in July 2002 when the Organisation of African Unity was formally buried and the AU was born.
The South African-based unicameral Pan-African Parliament (PAP)—a symbol of the country’s continental leadership aspirations—is key among the 18 new organs for which the AU’s constitutive Act of 2000 makes provision. But, while the PAP could well become one of Africa’s most important representative institutions, there were reports by May last year that it was experiencing financial difficulties caused by non-paying members.
A major challenge for the AU will be to convince its member states of the need to pool some of their sovereignty under the umbrella of the organization and its organs. This challenge is being played out in the “great debate” about a “United States of Africa” in which idealistic “federalists”, such as Libya’s Moammar Gadaffi, are pitted against pragmatic “gradualists”, such as Mbeki.
South Africa has long been instrumental in articulating the right to intervene in the affairs of member states in grave circumstances. Nelson Mandela and Mbeki both consistently argued for a continental intervention regime and a move away from the OAU’s obsession with the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs.
But if South Africa played a key role in the making of the AU, it had an even more influential role in the creation of Nepad, which was driven largely by Mbeki. The partnership is based on African leaders holding one another accountable in exchange for the recommitment of the industrialized world to Africa’s development. This epitomises Tshwane’s Africa strategy — so much so that it has caused irritation among other African governments.
South Africa was so determined to see Nepad succeed that, by last year, it was seeking to transform Nepad into its own domestic socio-economic plan, leading to a perception throughout the continent that South Africa would allow Nepad to rival the AU. One of the most innovative programmes advocated by Mbeki and his allies was the introduction of an African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) in 2003. There were great expectations for the success of South Africa’s own peer review process in 2005/06 since the country was such a central player
in the articulation of Africa’s emerging governance architecture.
Yet the South African process kicked off with great animosity and tension between the government and local civil society actors. Many South African NGOs were critical of what they regarded as the “controlled” nature of the South African process, charging that the government was seeking to dominate and dictate it.
In November last year the leaked report of the APRM’s Panel of Eminent Persons on South Africa made critical recommendations in areas such as: unemployment; capacity constraints and poor service delivery; poverty and inequality; land reform; violence against women and children; HIV/Aids; corruption; crime; xenophobia and racism; and managing diversity.
The report was met with objections from the South African government. Whether and how the tension over South Africa’s APRM draft report is resolved is likely to have a huge effect on a process that Tshwane was so instrumental in creating and shaping.
Nevertheless, it is the creation of the AU and Nepad that are most likely to be regarded as Mbeki’s greatest legacies.
Chris Landsberg is director of the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg
Can SA Resist Playing Bully in its Backyard?
Khabele Matlosa
The country seems poised to play a major role in ensuring peace and security in the SADC region and on the African continent
South Africa’s most critical challenge in its regional relations since the advent of democracy in 1994 has been how to engage its neighbours in ways that are different from hegemonic bullying, while still providing robust leadership among its peers.
Can the country continue to avoid the kind of unilateral interventionism that could give regional states the impression that South Africa is acting like the proverbial bull in a China shop?
When South Africa’s black majority gained political independence in 1994, the key question was whether South Africa would develop as a part of, or apart from, Southern Africa and the African continent.
The historical context for this is important. During the apartheid era South Africa was, to all intents and purposes, the region’s major destabilizing force, particularly in the 1980s. A regional hegemonic role since its watershed election of 1994 has shifted the imperatives of Pax Pretoriana from being a malevolent to being a more benign giant.
This has occurred through former president Nelson Mandela’s policy of nation-building and reconciliation within the country; diplomatic engagement in South Africa’s “near abroad”; and later, through President Thabo Mbeki’s much more forthright embrace of Pax Africana: promoting peace on the continent through
regional actors.
Mbeki’s twin policies of Pax South Africana and Pax Africana have therefore attempted—largely successfully—to coalesce South Africa’s interests with the larger interests of the African continent. This is one way of understanding South Africa’s leadership role in continental initiatives such as the African Union (AU) and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad).
It is therefore to be expected that Mbeki’s passion for Pax Africana—predicated on the African renaissance—dovetailed neatly with the Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa (CSSDCA) pioneered by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in 1991. It is no surprise that today Africa’s continental security agenda is driven primarily by the twin imperatives of Nepad and the CSSDCA through the AU.
Following the demise of apartheid, South Africa has begun to play a pivotal role in regional security efforts in Southern Africa, largely through the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
However, the prominent—and controversial—role that Tshwane played both militarily and diplomatically in the management of the Lesotho crises of 1994 and 1998 has contributed substantially to the concerns about South Africa’s motives in its backyard.
Following the eruption of a violent conflict in Lesotho in 1994 and several failed diplomatic attempts to resolve it, an intervention by a SADC diplomatic task force resulted in a breakthrough memorandum of agreement. This accord empowered South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe, and later Mozambique, to act on behalf of SADC in guaranteeing the fragile democracy of the mountain kingdom.
This was the first time that SADC had taken such a bold and decisive action in a regional political crisis.
Tshwane played a major mediation role in Lesotho’s later crisis in 1998, though dispatching Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi, and not the minister of foreign affairs, to manage Lesotho’s troubles was an unmistakable indication of the lowly position that the country occupied in South Africa’s pecking order.
There are sharply divided perceptions about the nature and character of South Africa’s military deployment in Lesotho in 1998. But whether perceived as an “invasion” or “intervention”, the stark reality is that South Africa and a small contingent from Botswana were able to quell Lesotho’s near civil war after mediation efforts by local civil society and churches had ended in dismal failure. Ironically, the mission was not managed through SADC’s then embattled Organ for Politics, Defence and Security (OPDS).
The organ was paralysed by a deep-seated six-year crisis that centred on competing calls for either its independence or full integration with SADC. This dispute generated mutual distrust and tension among SADC members and largely prevented the OPDS from responding to multiple conflicts in the region.
Between the 1998 and 1999 SADC summits, there were rival perceptions between South Africa and Zimbabwe about the functionality of the OPDS. However, the 1999 SADC summit in Maputo, Mozambique, finally broke the impasse and during the substantive SADC summit in Blantyre, Malawi, in 2001 a decision relating to the amicable restructuring of the OPDS was officially adopted.
For its part, and primarily through the facility of multilateral institutions, South Africa today seems poised to play a major role in ensuring peace and security in the SADC region and on the African continent. During 2004, for example, the South African Foreign Minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, chaired the AU’s newly-established Peace and Security Council (PSC); South Africa hosts the 265-member Pan-African Parliament, largely footing its bill of about $100-million; and South Africa was chair of the OPDS from August 2004 to August 2005.
It is against this backdrop of South Africa’s historical role in regional security that the deeper significance of its policymakers’ belief that “South Africa’s development is dependent on increased security, democracy and economic growth and development in Southern Africa and the rest of the continent” can be better understood.
Still, with a changing of the guard in the Union Buildings an imminent inevitability in 2009, only time will tell if South Africa is able to resist the lure of playing the schoolyard bully in its backyard.
Khabele Matlosa is the research director at the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, in Johannesburg.
SA’s Economic Expansion into Africa: Neo-colonialism or Development?
Judi Hudson
Described as “one of the biggest economic phenomena of the last decade”, the astonishing speed at which South Africa has become the largest investor in the rest of Africa has eclipsed even the recent surge in interest from non-African investors such as China.
Following a gradual increase on the continent after 1994, investment opportunities have taken off in the past five years, helped in part by the South African government’s relaxation of foreign exchange controls for businesses investing in Africa.
In just more than a decade of transition from apartheid pariah to legitimate player, South Africa has asserted its presence on the continent through corporate and parastatal investments and become a fulcrum in the flow of capital, goods and people.
Several South African companies are earning profits two to three times higher than those earned in their home operations, with reported average returns of between 30% on equity in the banking sector and up to 60% in other sectors.
South African Reserve Bank figures show that the country’s investment in the continent grew threefold, from R8-billion in 1996 to R26-billion in 2001. BusinessMap estimates that South African companies invested an average of $435-million a year in Southern Africa between 1994 and 2003.
In addition to light industry such as breweries and bottling plants, and the banking and finance sectors, South African firms have expanded their mining operations into Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Zambia, with Mvelaphanda Holdings, one of South Africa’s most promising black-managed and black-owned investments groups, being a new entrant.
Well-known brand chains that have joined the foray into Africa include Shoprite Checkers, Nando’s, Steers, Engen, Kwikserve, Woolworths and Game, as well as major retailers Pep Stores, Truworths, Metro Cash and Carry and Massmart.
Significantly, South Africa’s economic expansion is actively government-promoted, primarily in the form of the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC).
South African corporate investment into the rest of Africa is driven by two key factors: the South African market of 47-million consumers is too small to absorb its products, while South African companies are usually too small to compete in the industrialised world.
Local companies are assumed generally to have greater familiarity with conditions on the continent than investors from elsewhere outside Africa, which has proved to be fertile ground for investors. But the risks are high and it has not always been plain sailing for South African firms.
For example, SABMiller lost the “beer wars” in Kenya, where Metro Cash and Carry closed its doors in March 2005 after eight profitless years, while Shoprite Checkers failed to launch in the country because of strong competition. In Nigeria South African Airways’s acquisition of a 30% stake in the revamped Nigerian national carrier was cancelled abruptly in favour of Virgin Atlantic.
Blatantly anti-South African sentiment is also increasingly evident in many countries, where South African businesspeople—both black and white—have been described variously as “brash, arrogant, insensitive, selfish…the Americans of the continent”.
There is a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality to South Africa’s economic expansion: rather than pushing “the little guys” out of business, South African companies argue that they are breaking up local monopolies, driving down prices and creating jobs. Yet the discomfort within Africa about the country’s perceived economic
dominance—particularly in tourism, boosting consumer hoice and the transference of skills and technology to local workers—has deepened as South Africa has become a favoured “emerging market” for institutional investors abroad. Recent interviews in a Zambian shopping mall that revealed a deeply dissatisfied workforce at a South African store there may well point to room for improvement in how South African companies manage local sensitivities.
Many Southern Africans have attested to the brusque forthrightness of urban South Africans, especially in white management, that likely offend the cultural sensibilities of workers who may feel demeaned in their work environments. The
lack of local procurement has fuelled persistent complaints of crippling market distortions caused by the dumping of South African goods on to neighbouring markets.
Moreover, 12 South African companies—including “blue-chip” giants Anglo American, Anglovaal mining, De Beers and Iscor—were accused in a United Nations report in 2002 of involvement in illicit dealings in mineral resources in the conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Increasing calls are therefore being made in South Africa to regulate corporate behaviour and promote responsible ethical corporate citizenship. A number of initiatives exist already that may guide South African companies operating in Africa, namely the King II report, the UN Global Compact and the JSE Social Responsibility Index.
If such actions are not taken, South Africa could find itself saddled with the “ugly American” image of Uncle Sam in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Judi Hudson is an independent consultant who holds a master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Natal.
Tarrying on HIV Defers Dream of an African Renaissance
Angela Ndinga-Muvumba and Shauna Mottiar
South Africa’s peaceful democratic transition confounds Afro-pessimistic views that the continent is doomed. Yet the “Rainbow Nation” is still struggling to come to terms with the HIV/Aids epidemic—a crisis with long-term consequences for its political economy and the sustainability of Africa’s states and societies.
Five million South Africans are infected by the pandemic and Tshwane has launched the world’s most ambitious treatment programme that could play an important role in realising the African renaissance. But South Africa’s leadership
in Africa is compromised by how the government has related to its own HIV/Aids crisis and stands in stark contrast to the leadership demonstrated by countries such as Senegal and Uganda.
In 1991 the ANC health secretariat and the De Klerk government’s department of national health and population development formed the National Aids Convention of South Africa, the strategy of which was endorsed by then-president Nelson Mandela after the 1994 election. However, what followed was a disillusioning experience for many who had hoped South Africa would become a model for other countries.
The history of government equivocation on HIV/Aids is familiar to most South Africans: Sarafina II, the virodene debacle, President Thabo Mbeki’s dealings with the HIV/Aids dissidents, his arguments that conventional HIV discourses are inherently racist and that antiretrovirals (ARVs) are unsafe and toxic. The August 2003 decision to roll out ARVs was driven more by international pressure than newfound clarity over the deaths and suffering among ordinary South Africans.
Issues of race, sex, dissent and denial explain, in part, the government’s equivocation. Colonial and apartheid medicine had indeed argued that black people could not control their “insatiable sexual drives”. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s most African leaders neglected the HIV/Aids epidemic. Bucking this trend, Senegal’s president at the time, Abdou Diouf, and Uganda’s leader, Yoweri Museveni, addressed the challenges of HIV/Aids decisively. The epidemics in these countries took remarkably different trajectories. Senegal’s national HIV rate was contained to less than 1%. Uganda’s overall HIV prevalence rate fell from 13% in the early 1990s to 4,1% by 2003.
Mbeki, in contrast, “removed himself” from the HIV/Aids debate in 2002. His Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, continued with the rhetoric that many felt undermined key public health messages and South Africa had to relegate leadership on African HIV/Aids issues to other actors and institutions.
In August 2006 South Africa was acutely embarrassed at the Toronto International Aids Conference, when, among other incidents, Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, noted that South Africa’s HIV/Aids policies were the worst on the African continent.
The ensuing furore and protests in South Africa had a significant effect on the government. Just before World Aids Day on December 1 last year, Tshwane announced, after broad consultation, a new strategic plan for dealing with HIV/Aids and STIs (sexually transmitted infections). The Treatment Action Campaign observed notably that “the eight-year struggle to end government HIV denialism and confusion has ended”.
Will this reluctant shift at national level be reflected in South Africa’s African leadership?
In 2001 Africa’s leaders pledged to lead the HIV/Aids response from the front during the Abuja summit on HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria in Nigeria. Continental leaders agreed that HIV/Aids, TB and malaria should be “top priorities” and committed 15% of their national budgets to health.
The mid-term review of the Abuja Declaration took place in Abuja in May last year. Only Botswana has met the 15% health expenditure target. Gambia, Ghana,
Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe are making progress towards this goal. But governments such as South Africa argued that the Abuja health targets were too broad, and Tshabalala-Msimang went as far as seeking to reopen the debate on the 15% target—which South Africa has yet to meet.
In June 2001 proposals from African leaders had seen the establishment of the Global Fund to Fight HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. African leaders urged donors to put $10-billion into the fund. Yet, between 2002 and 2005, only $1-billion had been disbursed. Africa, and South Africa, has also failed to implement a meaningful advocacy strategy for replenishing the fund.
Mbeki is a member of the AU’s Aids Watch Africa, a group of continental heads of state mandated to advance Africa’s response to the pandemic, but his visible engagement has been negligible.
The UN has emphasised repeatedly the importance of the state in dealing with HIV/Aids and other nontraditional security threats. But it is unlikely that the South African government will be leading more robust state responses in Africa.
Eight years after the birth of the idea of an “African century”; 11 years after Thabo Mbeki’s famous “I am an African” speech; and 25 years after the onset of humanity’s most tragic recent outbreak of disease, South Africa has failed decisively to halt its own HIV/Aids epidemic and deferred the dream of an African renaissance.
Angela Ndinga-Muvumba is a senior researcher at the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town. Shauna Mottiar is a researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies in Jo’burg
‘Exporting peace’ to the Great Lakes?
Devon Curtis
How are South Africa’s efforts to “export” democracy to African countries in the Great Lakes region faring?
In December last year, an important milestone was reached in the peace process in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) when Joseph Kabila was sworn in as the first democratically elected president of the country in more than 40 years.
In August 2005 Burundi observed a similar achievement in its peace process when Pierre Nkurunziza became president of Burundi following a series of elections. Both elections marked the end of transitional periods intended to usher in peaceful democratic governance in Burundi and the DRC, after years of violent conflict. South Africa deployed about 3 000 peacekeepers to both countries under a United Nations umbrella, and its officials led peacemaking efforts there.
“Democracy promotion” across Africa is a key South African foreign policy objective. The department of foreign affairs’s official vision is, after all, “of an African continent that is prosperous, peaceful, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and united and which contributes to a world that is just and equitable”.
But South African officials tend to view appropriate conflict resolution techniques and processes of democratic consolidation in terms of their own domestic experience, so that the peace processes in these two countries have strongly reflected a South African approach to transitions. This approach assumes that inclusive dialogue and broad-based national unity governments can lead to peace, since differences are negotiable. It also assumes that constitutional development can contribute to ending violence. Are these assumptions valid?
Key elements of the South African “model” promoted and replicated in Burundi included: negotiations and dialogue with all belligerents; the establishment of a transitional national unity government; the creation of a new integrated army; and plans for a truth and reconciliation commission.
The idea is that immediate electoral contests can be counterproductive in countries emerging from violent conflict, whereas elite power-sharing pacts can buy time and allow liberal norms to take hold. As elites grow accustomed to working together, so greater democracy can be enshrined in a permanent constitution.
Many problems have been identified with this approach. There are conflicts between civic values and actual conflict and the probability that participants will not share a common set of values, nor even value mediation itself. Such processes impose a liberal, rational ethos that could fail in conflict environments. Compromises that enable ceasefires could undermine much-needed new rights-based institutions later. Globally, efforts to promote democracy and human rights have reshaped opportunities and constraints facing elites, without necessarily leading to liberal democracy.
Since the signing of the Arusha Accord in Burundi in 2000 and the Pretoria and Sun City agreements for the DRC in 2002/03, there have been some hopeful changes in both countries.
The elections in Burundi in 2005, with the establishment of permanent institutions of governance and a new constitution, were acclaimed across Africa and the world. In South Africa reactions to the elections were overwhelmingly positive. Newspaper headlines announced: “South Africa hails new era of democracy in Burundi” and “Hope for Burundi”.
South Africa adopted a similar approach in the peace process in the DRC. While different interests and issues are at stake in the DRC, South Africans and their partners supported a process of extensive dialogue with different belligerents and stakeholders, leading to a negotiated settlement that included a broad-based power-sharing transitional government, the establishment of a new national army and democratic elections. South African reaction to the elections in the Congo last year was positive, but cautious, possibly because of the violence in the DRC between the first and second rounds of voting.
Despite the optimism surrounding the elections and the establishment of new governments in Burundi and the DRC, the experiences of both countries have exposed the limitations of a South African peace process “model”. Burundi’s new government has shown some autocratic tendencies, while armed groups are still present in parts of the country. In the DRC the new state is very weak and fighting continued in the militia-controlled east of the country after the elections, as does illegal foreign exploitation of minerals.
Some also believe South Africa’s diplomatic involvement in the DRC cannot be separated from its urge to secure access to minerals for South African corporations, while Mandela’s mediation role was critical to Tshwane’s involvement in Burundi.
The contexts of the conflicts in Burundi and the DRC and the patterns of authority in the two countries are different—from each other, as well as vastly different from the South African case.
But despite the limitations in the “export” of the South African model to both countries, some aspects of the transitional strategies have had positive effects in Burundi and the DRC. It is too early to declare a decisive end to violence in Burundi and even less so in the DRC but, importantly, positive changes have occurred in both countries.
Devon Curtis is a lecturer in the department of politics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Bridging a Continent: North Africa and the Horn
Iqbal Jhazbhay
In 1986 Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui called for a metaphorical bridge across the Red Sea that would reintegrate Africa with Arabia several million years after a natural cataclysm had torn the Arabian Peninsula from the rest of Africa.
He noted that, just as in the view of continental pan-Africanists, the Sahara desert is a sea of communication linking states below the Sahara with their neighbours above the desert, so the Red Sea could become a similar bridge. Mazrui also noted that Emperor Haile Selassie had officially located Ethiopia as being part of the Middle East rather than Africa until the 1950s, before re-Africanising his country like Egypt’s Nasser. Echoes of these re-Africanisation policies can be found today in the pan-African foreign policies of Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Libya’s Moammar Gadaffi.
The colonial powers divided Africa into North and sub-Saharan Africa. Regrettably, international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, some UN agencies and Western foreign offices continue to entrench this division.
How can an activist, developmental South African foreign policy build bridges between North Africa and the Horn and the rest of the continent?
Tshwane has drawn on its historical liberation experience in building its relations with these North African countries. Nelson Mandela led South Africa’s move into the continent after he became president in 1994.
South Africa’s relations with Libya best illustrate Mandela’s combination of pragmatism and idealism. Despite criticism from within South Africa and Western countries, Mandela’s individualism paid off when, with Saudi Arabia, he was able to use his “good offices” to break the diplomatic logjam over the Lockerbie affair, leading to the 1998 decision that the Libyan suspects be tried in the Netherlands.
Mandela’s emphasis on human rights led him to keep Algeria’s military-dominated regime at arm’s length after the annulment of elections there in 1992. Mandela was, however, less critical of human rights abuses in Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia and developed ties with these countries.
President Thabo Mbeki’s yardstick for developing relations in North Africa after 1999 involved a more pragmatic measure of mutual economic benefit. The relationship between Tshwane and Algiers has been developed to a strategic level that makes Algeria one of South Africa’s closest friends on the continent and the most important partner in North Africa. An excellent chemistry has existed between Mbeki and Bouteflika and Tshwane has offered Algiers much assistance in internal political reconciliation, gender issues, multiculturalism and economic development.
Relations with Libya, under Mbeki’s leadership, have, however, been more complicated, reflecting something of a “good cop, bad cop” approach. Mandela
“softened” Gadaffi and guided him back into the international fold; Mbeki has told the “brother leader” some home truths about the consequences for Africa of his rhetorical outbursts and behaviour.
Morocco has expended much effort in trying to ensure that South Africa did not join other African countries in recognising the Polisario Front’s government-in-exile: the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). But in September 2004 South Africa announced that Tshwane would formally recognise the SADR. Tshwane- Rabat tensions are now so high that relations are conducted without
ambassadorial representation.
South Africa’s relations with Egypt are among the most complex and competitive it has in Africa. But the relationship has moved beyond Egypt’s losses of hosting the Pan-African Parliament and the 2010 World Cup to one of greater cooperation.
With regard to the Horn of Africa, South Africa held off developing close relations with Sudan until a political solution was found to the civil war in the country’s troubled south. Now South Africa is supporting skills development in the Sudanese civil service and contributing police and soldiers to the African Union mission in Darfur.
Ethiopia is host to the AU headquarters and ties with South Africa are close and growing closer. After opening an embassy in Asmara, South Africa is using its influence and resources to support Eritrea’s tenuous truce with Ethiopia.
South Africa has offered some support for the progress and stability achieved by the breakaway Somaliland administration in the north of otherwise anarchic Somalia. Recognising the need for an inclusive approach, it is among those AU countries arguing that the region should not be punished for returning to its colonial boundaries.
In moments of candour, leaders of North Africa and Sudan confess to a certain political identity crisis. Are they African, Arab, or Mediterranean?
Properly engaged by South Africa, these leaders will be left in no doubt as
to their core identity: African.
Iqbal Jhazbhay lectures in the department of religious studies, Unisa, Tshwane
These articles were first published in the Mail and Guardian, June 15-21, 2007. Posted here by permission from Adekeye Adebajo.