Zimbabwe: A Regional Solution?
Zimbabwe: A Regional Solution?
Table of Contents
  1. Executive Summary
Report / Africa 3 minutes

Zimbabwe: A Regional Solution?

Six months before scheduled elections, Zimbabwe is closer than ever to complete collapse. Inflation is between 7,600 per cent (government figures) and 13,000 per cent (independent estimates). Four out of five of the country’s twelve million people live below the poverty line and a quarter have fled, mainly to neighbouring countries.

Executive Summary

Six months before scheduled elections, Zimbabwe is closer than ever to complete collapse. Inflation is between 7,600 per cent (government figures) and 13,000 per cent (independent estimates). Four out of five of the country’s twelve million people live below the poverty line and a quarter have fled, mainly to neighbouring countries. A military-led campaign to slash prices has produced acute food and fuel shortages, and conducting any business is becoming almost impossible. An initiative launched by the regional intergovernmental organisation, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), to facilitate a negotiated political solution offers the only realistic chance to escape a crisis that increasingly threatens to destabilise the region. But SADC must resolve internal differences about how hard to press into retirement Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s 83-year-old president and liberation hero, and the wider international community needs to give it full support.

Following a government crackdown on the opposition in early March 2007, SADC mandated South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki to mediate between the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), with the objectives of securing agreement on constitutional reform ahead of March 2008 elections and ending the economic crisis. The SADC initiative is fragile but South Africa and the other regional countries are the only external actors with a chance to make a difference. Western sanctions – mainly targeting just over 200 members of the leadership with travel bans and asset freezes – have proven largely symbolic, and general condemnations from the UK and U.S. if anything counterproductive because they help Mugabe claim he is the victim of neo-colonial ambitions.

The regime needs external financial support to maintain its patronage networks and shore up the economy before risking elections (or before desperate people riot), and its request for a rescue package gives the regional initiative crucial leverage if SADC is willing to use it. Nevertheless, the challenges are daunting. Mugabe outmanoeuvred rivals in March 2007 to gain the ZANU-PF nomination for a new term. The party seeks to bypass Mbeki’s mediation by advancing a unilateral constitutional amendment that would tighten its hold on power by rigging the electoral process and ensuring it can name an eventual successor to Mugabe without a new popular vote. The MDC is bitterly divided and appears unable to mobilise effective opposition.

South Africa and the SADC mistrust the MDC, especially its larger faction led by Morgan Tsvangirai, and would like to see a government of national unity emerge led by a reformed ZANU-PF. Some SADC leaders remain Mugabe supporters, and there is a risk the organisation will accept cosmetic changes that further entrench the status quo. The ultimate objective of the reform process, however, is not regime change as such but to guarantee that all adult citizens can freely and fairly choose their rulers and that an electorally legitimated government can reengage with donors to turn the economy around. There is little likelihood that the opposition – so long as it remains badly fractured – can win an election in 2008, so the political risks the ruling party and SADC members who distrust the opposition are being asked to take are relatively limited.

It is critical that all international actors close ranks behind the Mbeki mediation. SADC should use its leverage and extend the desperately needed aid package and ask the West to lift its sanctions – such as they are – only in exchange for full ZANU-PF cooperation with the mediation process and implementation of reforms that will allow free and fair elections as early as possible in 2008. If such cooperation is not forthcoming, Mbeki should candidly and promptly acknowledge failure, and SADC should refuse to endorse any election not a product of the mediation and be prepared to isolate Mugabe and his regime.

The regional body should also enlist a panel of retired African presidents to help Mbeki prevail on Mugabe to accept and implement reforms and most critically convince him to retire in 2008. The wider international community should make detailed preparations to contribute to Zimbabwe’s recovery if the mediation succeeds but also be ready to apply tougher sanctions if it collapses.

Pretoria/Brussels, 18 September 2007

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