Welile Nhlapo is something of a pocket battleship plying Africa’s diplomatic waters. Almost as wide as he is high, Nhlapo has always been a straight shooter. But now that he is officially retired from the South African diplomatic service, he can really fire the big guns with impunity.
He did so at a seminar last week of the NGO Salo about the crisis in Burundi. Burundi’s ambassador to South Africa, Isaie Ntirizoshira, tried to convince a sceptical audience that the reason for the 15-month crisis was not, as most people suppose, the decision of his boss, President Pierre Nkurunziza, to run for a third term in office.
This, in the eyes of almost everyone else, was a clear violation of the two-term limits in Burundi’s constitution and in the Arusha peace accords which ended a 12-year civil war and ushered in the current democratic era in 2005.
But Nkurunziza used some legal sophistry to wiggle free of those limits by claiming he had been “nominated” by Parliament and not “elected” by the people for his first time from 2005 to 2010 and so it did not count.
He persuaded an entirely pliant Constitutional Court to endorse this patently self-serving legal opinion.
Nkurunziza’s decision ignited opposition protests and then violence which have continued on and off ever since.
But Ntirizoshira insisted the third term bid was not the trigger of the violence. He claimed Nkurunziza’s political opponents had been planning the violence ever since they badly lost the 2010 elections – because they realised then that they could never win any election.
“It is a sort of tradition for Burundi opposition leaders to resort to violence after they lose elections,” he blandly stated.
Nhlapo, a former South African envoy to the Great Lakes region and former national security adviser in the Presidency, gave this argument the respect it deserved by ignoring it. Instead he diagnosed Nkurunziza’s third term bid as just another case study of what he called “a regional pandemic of people wanting to stay in power forever”.
And he then berated the AU for having left it up to this region, the EAC, to resolve the Burundi crisis.
“You take a troubled region and its institutions, including its regional body (the EAC) and you hope that institution will come up with a solution?” he asked.
“It’s not going to happen, because there is a regional pandemic of people wanting to stay in power forever. It’s a regional disease. Nobody can call anyone to order. When the EAC met in Dar es Salaam to consider the situation in Burundi, the question of changing the constitution was discussed.
“They came to the conclusion that this was not an area they wanted to get involved in. If you do something and you believe it is correct, if I do the same, you can’t tell me I’m wrong. It’s not possible. This is politics. It’s all about power.”
That was a shot right through so much of the elaborate justifications and prevarications of the EAC on this issue and a warning to the AU that it should immediately re-think its approach to resolving the Burundi crisis.
The leader who the AU and EAC put in charge of the Burundi problem is Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni who has remained in office for 30 years, by hook or by crook So, as Nhlapo says, he can hardly tell Nkurunziza to step down, with a straight face.
Museveni, incidentally, is also playing a destructive role in South Sudan, propping up President Salva Kiir militarily and protecting him from the repercussions of his atrocities in the civil war there. At last month’s AU summit in Kigali he resisted demands from other leaders that both Kiir and his deputy – and mortal enemy – Riek Machar should stand down if South Sudan were to stand any chance of returning to peace.
At the Salo seminar Martin Rupiya, associate professor at Unisa’s Institute for Renaissance Studies, quoted from a study which found that African countries which had emerged from civil war, often relapsed into war again after about 10 years. Rupiya noted that it was often elections which triggered this return to violence. And Burundi looks like a perfect example of the problem.
Rupiya’s prescription for the problem was for such countries to take a 10-year breather from democracy after emerging from conflict, to allow them to settle down. But would that really help? Nhlapo was being too regional when he talked about “a regional pandemic of people wanting to stay in power forever”. The virus has spread to the continent.
If you look around, you’ll see lots of leaders who are infected. The disease is an addiction to power.
And Nhlapo warned that “the bigger problem is still going to come once we look at what’s going to happen in November in the DRC”. That’s when Kabila is also supposed to step down after two terms – but is also finding lots of technical excuses not to do so.
“When the DRC implodes we will all be running around like headless chickens, coming with non-solutions,” said Nhlapo.
Is anyone in Addis Ababa, Pretoria and all the other capitals listening?