Love Thy Neighbor

Nowhere is there greater concern about the crisis in Zimbabwe than in the one country that, by itself, has the means to make or break Robert Mugabe: neighboring South Africa. But President Thabo Mbeki doesn’t yet appear ready to pull the plug on the man who’s giving him so many sleepless nights.

South of the muddy-brown Limpopo River that separates the two countries, South African police and immigration officials have contingency plans to handle thousands of refugees if the presidential election results in civil war. Next to AIDS and the crime rate, Zimbabwe is just about the biggest crisis worrying South Africans, some of whom blame the Mugabe government directly for a critical slide in the value of their currency, the rand, and a lack of investor confidence. The local American Chamber of Commerce estimated last year that South Africa had lost $3 billion worth of potential foreign investment because of Zimbabwe. The Brussels-based International Crisis Group reports that southern Africa as a whole will miss out on $36 billion in possible investment as a result of Zimbabwe’s instability.

There are already 2 million illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe living and looking for work in South Africa, some involved in occasional xenophobic clashes with the local unemployed. Border officials, police and military are having to deal with an influx of up to 250 Zimbabweans a day, most of whom enter the country illegally and spend the night in transit camps before being trucked back over the border.

South Africa’s national electricity supplier, eskom, and its petroleum producer SASOL are both providing Zimbabwe with services for which the Mugabe government has no foreign exchange to pay. Zimbabwe depends on South Africa for most of its technical support and consumer goods and, with its agricultural sector seriously damaged by the land invasions, it is now looking to its southern neighbor for staple food supplies. Just as the isolated, white-minority government of Rhodesia once depended for its survival on apartheid-era South Africa, now beleaguered Zimbabwe considers President Mbeki’s South Africa to be its lifeline.

So why doesn’t Mbeki lower the boom on his dictatorial northern counterpart? The answer probably lies in Mbeki’s greater plan for African solidarity, as espoused in the New Partnership for Africa’s Development drawn up by him and other African leaders from Nigeria, Senegal, Eygpt and Algeria. NEPAD involves a “peer review” process to censure, possibly even intervene in, states that do not practice good governance. But Mbeki is not prepared to take such action unilaterally.

But perhaps his patience with Mugabe is wearing thin. At the World Economic Forum annual meeting in New York two weeks ago, Mbeki pointedly called for free and fair elections in Zimbabwe. His special economic adviser at the meeting, Wiseman Nkuhlu, was even more direct: neither the South African government nor the Southern African Development Commmunity (SADC), of which Zimbabwe is a member, would recognize the Mugabe government if the presidential election is not free and fair, said Nkuhlu.

The South Africans followed this up last week with the announcement of an impressive team of observers, led by a prominent diplomat and former leading black businessman, Sam Motsuenyane, for the Zimbabwe election. The aim of the South African team, which includes two judges, is to “let the people of Zimbabwe speak through the ballot box,” President Mbeki told Parliament.

With bans and restrictions by Mugabe on British and European Union observers, the report on the election by the South African team will become an important assessment of “free and fair.” And pressure is building on Mbeki not only from Britain, the Commonwealth and the European Union, but also from SADC and other African leaders who, in keeping with the NEPAD principles, are anxious to establish their continental credibility. That will make it difficult for the South African observers to come up with a whitewash, as they did in Zimbabwe’s 2000 general election.

Whatever the result, Mbeki will not act hurriedly. The least that can be expected is that, if Mugabe is returned, even under dubious circumstances, Mbeki will continue his quiet diplomacy, and he and other African leaders from the nepad initiative will maintain their steady pressure. That, more than hectoring from abroad, might even persuade Zimbabwe’s head of state — one of the last of the colonial-era African nationalists — that a graceful retirement while in power is a better option than being censured out of office by his African peers.