Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe mocked the Commonwealth as a useless and intrusive organisation when he walked out of it in December 2003. “The Commonwealth is a mere club, but it has become like an ‘Animal Farm’, where some members are more equal than others,” he scoffed after the organisation refused, at its summit in Abuja, to lift its suspension of Zimbabwe the year before because it said he had rigged his re-election.
“If the choice was made for us to lose our sovereignty and become a member of the Commonwealth or to remain with our sovereignty and lose membership of the Commonwealth, then I would say… let the Commonwealth go. What is it to us? Our people are overjoyed, the land is ours. We are now the rulers and owners of Zimbabwe,” Mugabe declared, suggesting that the organisation had nothing to offer the country but meddling.
Iden Wetherell, then editor of the Zimbabwe Independent newspaper, remarked at the time: “Despite all the rhetoric, few doubt that Mugabe wants to be readmitted. He wants to strut upon the world stage. The suspension has been a huge humiliation for him.’’
Even so, was Mugabe right to suggest that leaving the Commonwealth would cost his Zimbabwean compatriots nothing worthwhile, except the dubious pleasure of watching their president strut his stuff at summits?
Champions of the Commonwealth do not make huge claims for the benefits of membership of the organisation. Yet they do insist it is worthwhile. The Commonwealth is unusual in that it brings together a few rich developed countries with many poor, undeveloped ones.
That provides a potential for the rich members to give a helping hand to the poorer members. And they do provide help.
It is not large amounts of aid that the Commonwealth offers. The Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation (CFTC) is the organisation’s development arm.
Compared with those of many member states, its annual budget of about R300 million is small.
But that aid is leveraged through other resources, such as bilateral aid from richer member states, and about 40 percent of it is focused on Africa.
The CFTC is also a typical Commonwealth organisation in that its “assistance is targeted towards helping member countries acquire knowledge and institutional capacity to address their own development priorities”.
This stress on training and knowledge is common to much of the Commonwealth’s work. It offers people-to-people contact across its 54 member states and in a wide variety of fields, including training to government officials, business skills and scientific research.
The Commonwealth Africa Investment Fund also channels long-term investments to the continent.
Patrick Wintour, formerly of the Commonwealth Foundation, the umbrella body for Commonwealth civil society organisations, and now associate director at the Royal Commonwealth Society, says being out of the Commonwealth has deprived Zimbabwe of participation in Commonwealth Heads of Governments meetings every two years and the more frequent meetings of Commonwealth ministers in fields such as education, finance and foreign affairs.
This is where leaders deliberate the organisation’s key values and aims: building democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law, resolving conflicts and promoting social and economic development. That is also a fundamental mission of the London-based Commonwealth Secretariat, the official heart of the organisation.
These values, ironically, are comprehensively enshrined in the Harare Declaration of 1991.
Likewise, Wintour believes that Zimbabwe is the poorer for its stance because over the past nine years, ‘‘high-flying military officers” from that country have not participated with Commonwealth peers from Nigeria, Pakistan, India, Kenya and so on in training at Britain’s Sandhurst military academy.
He suggests that the main benefit of this training would be to instil the values of democracy and civilian rule, which are key to the future of Zimbabwe, since the question of whether Mugabe’s military officers would accept real political change is crucial.
Again, these are precisely the sorts of values Mugabe would not want his top brass to uphold.
But if all these important functions of the Commonwealth hold no appeal for Mugabe, Mugabe is of course not Zimbabwe, even if he often acts as if he were.
Many other Zimbabweans, likely a majority, appreciate the Commonwealth precisely because it kicked Mugabe out and believe that in doing so, it added yet another bit of pressure for political change.
But, apart from losing out on these official activities, Zimbabwe has also lost the “opportunity to take part in fullest sense of Commonwealth organisations – for instance, Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, Commonwealth scholarships, Commonwealth Local Government Forum, and so on,” Wintour says.
Some tentative efforts have been made to restore Zimbabwe’s links to these Commonwealth civil society forums – of which there are about 60 – since the unity government was formed in 2009.
Wintour notes that four Commonwealth Professional Fellows, nominated by Zimbabwean civil society, visited Britain on a study tour in March.
Depending on progress in the unity government, these links could increase, he suggests.
An Australian official with considerable experience of the Commonwealth believes that even if he can’t say it publicly, even Mugabe has recently privately expressed regret that Zimbabwe remains outside the Commonwealth.
And, with a multiparty unity government (ostensibly) in charge, the range of opinions about the Commonwealth, even in the Zimbabwe government, is quite broad.
For instance, the Speaker of Parliament. Lovemore Moyo, a member of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), is known to feel regret that MPs cannot join the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and so can’t visit other parliaments throughout the member states, to learn how they operate and to build solidarity among democrats.
David Coltart, a member of the smaller MDC and the education minister in the unity government, expressed the hope that Zimbabwe could return to the Commonwealth nearly two years ago when the subject was briefly raised at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Trinidad.
Despite this widespread yearning to return to the Commonwealth, experts do not expect the country to apply for readmission at this year’s heads of government meeting in Perth, Australia.
That is likely to happen only after new elections, and depending upon who wins, they say.
That’s how it happened with other members that were suspended or walked out and then were readmitted, such as South Africa, Pakistan and Nigeria.
But they note that even after elections, Zimbabwe might not get back in quickly, because the Commonwealth requires a country which applies for admission or readmission to demonstrate broad public support for the move.
If Tsvangirai, prime minister in the unity government, wins the next election, he will probably have to include some Zanu-PF members in his government, to discourage the military or the other security forces from interfering in politics.
If so, such a new government would find it hard to reach consensus on readmission to the Commonwealth because the Zanu-PF members might be against it.
If and when Zimbabwe does rejoin the Commonwealth, it could be a more useful organisation for its members, though, again in ways that might not always appeal to Zanu-PF.
An Eminent Persons Group (EPG) is studying ways of making the Commonwealth more relevant and increasing its effectiveness. Its recommendations will be considered by the Perth summit.
That the Commonwealth felt the need to improve itself in this way was an implicit acknowledgement that its benefits to members (including, potentially, Zimbabwe) were in some ways deficient.
Canadian Senator Hugh Segal, a member of the EPG, explained on a recent visit to South Africa that among the key recommendations are ways to strengthen the Commonwealth’s ability to ensure that its members uphold the organisation’s fundamental values of democracy, human rights, the rule of law and good governance.
The EPG’s draft report recommends that all the Commonwealth’s basic values and principles, which are scattered across various declarations, should be consolidated into a single charter.
The Commonwealth secretary-general would be explicitly mandated to ensure all member states uphold these values.
That would address the existing problem where secretaries-general sometimes feel they have to consult all the member states before criticising a member government for violating the Commonwealth’s values.
The problem has come into focus sharply with the current secretary-general, Kamalesh Sharma of India, who has been exceptionally reluctant to voice any public criticism of member governments.
Last year, he faced an interval revolt in the Secretariat, the British press revealed, because he failed to say anything about major transgressions, such as the Sri Lankan government’s slaughter of unarmed Tamil civilians in the last days of its defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009.
Sharma responded to the internal criticism by instructing his staff that his and their mandates did not include such criticisms.
If the EPG’s recommendations are accepted in Perth, that would change and he would be obliged to criticise such violations – “within a normal news cycle”, Segal said.
To help him engage transgressors, he would be given a special commissioner dedicated to protecting the Commonwealth’s political values.
The EPG has also recommended improvements in the Commonwealth’s development and training functions, sometimes in innovative ways.
Segal noted, for instance, that although the Commonwealth Games are probably the most visible activities of the organisation, they and the official Commonwealth have practically no links.
The EPG proposes to change that by recommending programmes for Commonwealth Games athletes to provide sports training for athletes from less-developed member states.
The EPG also wants the Commonwealth to beef up its efforts to fight HIV/Aids, for example.
And again it proposes tackling the problem via the organisation’s value system.
Segal noted that several member states still have anti-sodomy laws inherited from the colonial era.
These laws obviously discourage many men from signing up for Aids treatment so that the Commonwealth should engage those governments “robustly” to repeal the laws, the EPG proposes. – Independent Foreign Service