Zuma is out of step with allies

President Jacob Zuma chatting with President Ian Khama of Botswana. Khama has made strong remarks about Syrias President Bashar al-Assad and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, implying he was not impressed with South Africas position on these countries.

Botswana’s President Ian Khama is known for being a straight-talking military man.

In a region where it’s considered impolite to mention the word “democracy” in the company of autocrats in case it offends them, he stands out.

In 2008 he startled his peers by refusing to recognise Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s president because of the highly questionable manner of his election.

Last week Khama had some more direct words to say about Zimbabwe and Syria in the presence of President Jacob Zuma, who was on a state visit to Botswana.

In their joint communiqué the two leaders merely “urged the political parties in Zimbabwe to set and adhere to the timelines for the adoption of the new constitution, holding of the referendum and elections”.

But in his remarks at a state luncheon given for Zuma, who is the Zimbabwe mediator for the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Khama said “nothing other than free and fair elections should be acceptable to the people of Zimbabwe, or the rest of us in the international community”.

The SADC, he said, “must ensure the process leading up to the elections, and not only the elections themselves, is transparent for all to witness and devoid of attempts at manipulation by one party or the other”.

He added: “Therefore SADC monitors and those from the wider international community should participate in observing the process before, during and even after the elections.”

This was clearly directed at Zanu-PF, which certainly doesn’t want the “wider international community” snooping into the elections.

On Syria, the two leaders in their joint communiqué merely wished the new UN-Arab League special envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, success in ending the crisis.

But in his after-lunch remarks, Khama was again much stronger, expressing deep concern about “the loss of many innocent lives at the hands of Assad’s murderous regime which as a result has lost legitimacy, if they ever had any in the first place”.

He added: “Equally, we are disturbed by the continuous staunch stand of some permanent members of the UN Security Council, specifically Russia and China, which frustrates the concerted efforts of the international community to find a lasting solution to the Syrian conflict.”

There seemed to be some indirect advice to Zuma on Zimbabwe in Khama’s speech. And perhaps something more than mere advice in his blunt criticism of Assad and of Russia and China.

South Africa has taken a studiously neutral line on Syria, refusing to single out Assad’s regime for harsher criticism than his rebel enemies. And it has mostly voted with Russia and China on Syria in the UN Security Council.

So Khama presumably wanted Zuma to bathe in the reflected ignominy of his attack on South Africa’s two partners in Brics.

At about the same time that was happening, South Africa’s Deputy Minister of International Relations and Co-operation, Marius Fransman, representing South Africa at the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran, was hearing Egypt’s new President Mohammed Mursi saying much the same things about Assad and Russia and China for protecting him at the UN.

Is Zuma’s government starting to join these dots and draw some conclusions about its Syrian position?

So far it has tended to dismiss such criticism of Assad as an expression of Western interests or Middle East regional rivalries.

At a stretch you could interpret Mursi’s criticism as indicating that he is part of the regional Sunni plot against Assad’s ruling Alawite clique, a Shia sub-sect, and against his major ally Iran, the regional Shia superpower.

Also at a stretch you could dismiss Khama’s harsh words about Assad as further proof of his Western allegiances.

That would certainly be the way Julius Malema would see it. But it’s getting more and more difficult to stretch the cover that far.

Maybe when just about all our African allies are marching in unison against Assad, we might have to acknowledge that we’re the ones out of step.