A president who will not be missed

“Good riddance of bad rubbish” is, I suspect, how a lot Zimbabweans will greet the news that President Thabo Mbeki has been given the sack from the presidency by his party the ANC of South Africa. To say that this is the best piece of news I have heard for a long while is, perhaps, a serious understatement. Of course I was aware that President Mbeki had not endeared himself to many of his compatriots and to the generality of the suffering masses in his country’s neighbourhood.

The signs have not been good for him for quite a while. President Mbeki famously denied that HIV caused AIDS and denied or blocked government action to relieve the suffering of many of his people who were afflicted by the deadly disease. Only in the face of overwhelming global pressure and mounting evidence of the deadly carnage that the disease was wrecking in the country, did Mbeki relent and allow unhindered implementation of AIDS prevention and treatment programmes. But the damage had been done to his credibility and sense of judgement.

Mr Mbeki also launched a crusade to weaken, sideline and punish those he considered as threatening his leadership position. Tokyo Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa were early victims and Jacob Zuma had been a target for a long period. Ironically, it is his relentless pursuit of Zuma which has driven Mbeki to his Waterloo before his term as president of the South African Republic had expired. The writing was on the wall when Mbeki dismally lost to Zuma in his attempt to extend his tenure as president of the ruling party by another term. And when he was fingered by the judiciary as having interfered in the prosecution of his nemesis, the game was well and truly up. There was only one way out for him – to drink the cup of poison.

However it is for his role in Zimbabwe that Mbeki will forever be remembered by many people around the world. For eight long years, President Mbeki has worked hard to prop and protect the discredited, increasingly unpopular and brutish neighbour in the north, Robert Mugabe. Of course the support has not been overt and tacit - even a man of his immense power and influence could not openly condone the excesses of his neighbour. But his so called “quite diplomacy” had, to many impartial observers, become a euphemism for protectionism of the abhorrent Mugabe regime.

For eight long years, and perhaps more, President Mbeki watched as Mugabe, in a fit of madness, reduced what was one of the strongest economies in Africa into a complete basket case of poor and hungry masses. He watched or, more accurately perhaps, turned his eyes away as millions of Zimbabwean flooded across the borders to escape political repression and poverty in their home state. He watched and acquiesced as Mugabe stole repeated elections through naked violence and blatant rigging. When his observers and advisors reported on the malfeasance of his neighbour, he ignored or suppressed their reports.

For a long eight years, President Mbeki positioned himself as the mediator of the conflict in Zimbabwe vowing that he would end the unfolding tragedy while he supped with the devil, clasped hands with him and declared to the incredulous and bewildered world that “there is no crisis in Zimbabwe”. With such comforting support, Mugabe was allowed to freely proceed and do what he knows best – inflicting untold pain and suffering on his people.

Many are celebrating the recently concluded talks on a government of national unity in Zimbabwe as a triumph of Mbeki’s consummate diplomacy skills. But even more people will beg to differ and the verdicts have already starting coming in. The agreement has, at best, been received with universal scepticism and, at worst, with outright rejection by many important stakeholders. Even before the ink on the agreement was dry, his long-term beneficiary, Robert Mugabe, was complaining loudly and bitterly to the entire world that he was unhappy with the agreement because the opposition “demanded more than they deserved”.

As I write this article, there is a reported deadlock on the sharing of cabinet positions because Zanu-PF is reneging on earlier understandings and demanding a control of all the strategic ministries while relegating the opposition to second-tier and less strategic portfolios. The signs are not good for the future of the agreement as long as Mr Mugabe remains in any sort of control. Mugabe has been and continues to be the albatross around Zimbabwe’s neck. That is the cardinal fundamental that Mbeki never got to understand or accept through the long eight years of his so-called facilitation.

The departure of Mr Mbeki, deserved and welcome as it is, will be very good news for the oppressed people of Zimbabwe in particular and the African democratic movement in general. It is good news because Mugabe will realise all too quickly that he has lost his protector and has to settle for what he has got now. Mugabe’s hand will now be forced to make this deal work otherwise he will be forced into another election which he will dismally loose. Mugabe is no fool and he should realise that any attempt by him to jettison the unity agreement will have far less attractive consequences for him because the successor regime in South Africa is likely to be far less accommodating to his dictatorial excesses and his waywardness.

For the democratic movement generally, the fall of a powerful political personality like Mbeki was again confirm the time proven tenet of democracy that no leader is mightier than the people he leads. The problem we have had in Zimbabwe (and indeed in other countries under dictatorship) is that Mugabe had grown to believe, rightly or wrongly, that he was bigger than the people of Zimbabwe. That is why he does not respect their intelligence (as attested by his continual attribution of his unpopularity to the British and American interference) nor care for their suffering.

The jettisoning of Mbeki by his party is also a good lesson to Zanu-PF on what it should have done to Mugabe at least twenty years ago when it became all too apparent that he was leading the country astray. There have been many opportunities for Zanu-PF to tell Mugabe to go but there has been very few if any who have launched a serious leadership challenge to Mugabe. Joshua Nkomo did in the early years of independence and he was mercilessly crushed, Edgar Tekere tried in the late eighties and he was buried. More recently Simba Makoni threw his hat into the ring but his motives were as questionable as his efforts were feeble.

The greater tragedy has been that for every single voice of dissent a dozen sycophantic voices have emerged to praise and fawn on Mugabe’s leadership greatness. And the tragic effect of the failure to unseat Mugabe is now all too plain to see - except perhaps by the outgoing President Mbeki who saw no evil and heard no evil in Mr Robert Mugabe. Mr Mbeki will not be missed by the people of Zimbabwe.