The presidents’ club

Jacoline Prinsloo

President Jacob Zuma walks next to Mozambican President Armando Guebuza and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on their way to the SADC summits official opening.

President Jacob Zuma’s premature departure from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Maputo on Friday to deal with the fallout from the Marikana shooting disaster seems to have played into Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s hands.

It may also have helped Madagascar’s ousted president Marc Ravalomanana.

After Zuma left, the other SADC leaders made two bad decisions favouring Mugabe.

First they decided to emasculate the SADC Tribunal by reducing it to a court that can adjudicate only disputes between states, and not disputes between individuals and their governments.

This decision was what Mugabe had been demanding since the tribunal ruled that his seizure of white farms had been racist and illegal.

The SADC summit also evidently indulged Mugabe’s demand that his Zanu-PF should be allowed to reopen negotiations with its partners in Zimbabwe’s three-year-old unity government for a new constitution.

This was after negotiators from Zanu-PF and the two factions of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) had spent three years of hard bargaining to produce a draft constitution last month. Then Zanu-PF hardliners rejected it, basically because they said it took away too many of the president’s powers.

The summit decided that “if there are any difficulties with regard to the constitution and implementation of agreements, the facilitator (Zuma) should be called upon to engage with the parties and assist them resolve such issues”.

Zuma, who has stood up to Mugabe before, when other regional leaders evidently cannot, might have persuaded his peers to tell Mugabe: “Enough already and let’s get on and adopt this constitution so we can hold something resembling free and fair elections.”

Whether Zuma would have helped to prevent the emasculation of the tribunal is less certain, since he was, after all, present at the SADC summit when the tribunal was suspended because of its ruling against Mugabe.

Yet Zuma, one hopes, would at least have advocated the recommendation of the SADC justice ministers to the Maputo summit, that the tribunal be reinstated with jurisdiction over disputes between citizens and their governments – even if that would exclude human rights cases until the SADC had adopted a specific human rights protocol.

That proposal was itself worrying. But it was better than the Maputo summit’s decision that the tribunal should hear only disputes between member states.

So it was a good summit for Mugabe.

As some consolation for democrats, though, Zuma’s absence may have also helped the cause of Ravalomanana.

He was ousted by Madagascar’s self-appointed ruler Andry Rajoelina in a March 2009 coup and forced into exile in SA. He demands to be allowed to return to Madagascar to contest forthcoming presidential elections.

Rajoelina has prevented his return and has vowed to arrest him if he does, because a Malagasy court convicted and sentenced him, in absentia, to a long prison term for alleged complicity in the shooting of protesters by his presidential guard.

SADC leaders decided last year that Ravalomanana should be allowed to return unconditionally.

Since then, SADC mediators, led by SA Deputy Minister of International Relations and Co-operation Marius Fransman, proposed that both Ravalomanana and Rajoelina withdraw from the presidential elections, to resolve the impasse and move the country forward.

Presumably Zuma would have argued for this proposal. In his absence his fellow leaders instead seemed to back Ravalomanana fully, asserting his “right to return unconditionally to Madagascar to take part in the political process” and calling on Rajoelina’s government to “allow him to return in safety”.

The sad thing, though, is that only the bad summit decisions, on Zimbabwe, will prevail. The tribunal will be emasculated and Zuma will have to coax the long-suffering MDC back into further constitutional negotiations to make further concessions to Mugabe.

Rajoelina will again ignore the summit’s instruction to let Ravalomanana come home to stand for election. And the SADC will do nothing about it.

Is this anything more than a club of self-serving leaders?