Disaster looms for Africa – and the world - as COP17 fails in Durban

Disaster looms for Africa as the UN climate change conference in Durban – COP17 – failed to achieve any significant movement towards a new global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While an interim pledge was agreed upon to draft a new treaty by 2015 that could kick in by 2020, it is so weak as to actually render COP17 a failure. And Africa stands to pay the price.

As the UN climate change circus packs up and heads out of town the world is left no better off, with smaller, developing and poor countries, especially in Africa, still heading headlong to disaster. Two weeks of acrimonious bickering in front of the world’s news cameras and millions of dollars spent on travel, accommodation, entertainment, lavish dinners, road shows, side shows and heavens knows what else, delivered almost nothing of note. Climate change has become a massive industry in its own right that has to be kept alive by hook or by crook, and effective, binding agreements to combat global warming are not to get in its way.

UN officials and delegates from some of the major economies are patting themselves on the backs, saying progress was made at COP17 in Durban towards replacing the Kyoto Protocol with a new binding international treaty to force countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. What they were getting excited about was a last-minute, weakly worded “agreement” that included the recalcitrant squabblers, the US, India and China, in which the parties promise to draft a new global emissions treaty by 2015, but which will not take effect before 2020 at the earliest.

Even if it is implemented after 2020, it will take at least another decade or more for its effects to start kicking in. By that time global temperatures – with those in Africa being higher than elsewhere – are likely to have risen to the point where massive devastation will already have set in. It is estimated that up to 180-million people in poorer countries are at risk of dying as a result.

Much is being made of the fact that the US, India and China were brought on board and that other major economies, like the EU,  extended their commitment under the Kyoto treaty from 2012 to 2015. However, EU countries are bound by EU law to reduction targets similar to that of Kyoto, so it makes no difference. And India and China only came on board after the wording of the interim deal was sufficiently weakened to avoid strict policing and leave them a lot of interpretative leeway.

And the US, which has never subjected itself to reducing its emissions and is not bound by the Kyoto Protocol despite being the world’s biggest polluter, still insists that China and India should be treated the same as the US before it will subject itself to a treaty. However, China and India in turn insist that that would be unfair as they are new polluters developing their economies to reduce poverty, while the US is a historical polluter and is already a developed economy. They refuse to be scapegoated for the historical sins of the US and other developed nations who have been responsible for the most climate change damage in the past. Come 2015 or 2020 and these issues are likely to still put a spanner in the works.

And the global climate change fund Africa has been crying out for and which is essential to assist poorer, lesser developed nations to deal effectively with climate change, both through mitigation and adaptation, also did not materialise. The best the developed, wealthy nations – the major polluters for whose bad practices poor nations such as those in Africa will be paying the price - could come up with was a pledge to establish a fund that would guide the flow of much of what they hoped would be US$100-billion in annual pledges by 2020 to mitigate the impact of climate change in poor countries. By then it will probably be much too late in many instances, even if the fund does ever come into existence.

Even though COP17 took place in Africa, and although the African delegations came well armed with facts, figures, projections and impassioned pleas, they were once again made to stand at the kitchen door while the rich, developed nations and the new cash-flush kids on the block, China and India, partied futilely into the night.

Environmental activists and representatives from developing and smaller, poorer countries have labelled COP17 a failure and the last-minute “agreement” as allowing for far too long a time-line of action, being weak, and one that can easily be ignored by the major economies responsible for most of the world’s emissions. Despite the delegates’ best efforts, the world continues to become a deadlier place each and every day.  

Notes from Africa

The recolonisation of Africa

(This column is published weekly in the online edition of Leadership Magazine.)

Last week the world was treated to the spectacle of the Paris Conference where one Western leader after the other – together with a few token Arab dictators – patted themselves on the back for “liberating” Libya from the rule of Muammar Gaddafi. It quickly brought to mind the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884 at which Africa was sliced up among its European colonisers.

Quite rightly so South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma let it be known - as any self-respecting African should have done - that he would have nothing to do with this cynical circus initiated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron, ostensibly to decide Libya's future...as if Libyans and Africans themselves should not be doing that.

In the end there was a conspicuous absence of influential African leaders, with a number of African countries and the African Union (AU) having refused to recognise the Nato-installed National Transitional Council (NTC) as the new government of Libya. Libya’s neighbour, Algeria, was there, but only as an observer and perhaps only because its shared border with Libya gave it a pressing reason to be.

Russia and China – both which opposed the Nato-led military campaign to oust Gaddafi - attended as observers, with Russia having recognised the NTC only days earlier. However, both these countries have major vested interests in Libya, with China having enormous interests further afield in Africa, such as Angola now being its biggest supplier of oil.

For many Sarkozy and Cameron’s 2011 style “scramble for Africa” conference also brought to mind erstwhile ANC leader Chief Albert Luthuli’s acceptance speech in Norway in 1960 when he received the Nobel Peace Prize and said: “Our continent has been carved up by the great powers. Alien governments have been forced upon the African people by military conquest and by economic domination”.

As Vusi Gumede of the University of Johannesburg so eloquently reminded us in an opinion piece published in The Sunday Independent this weekend: “A case in point 50 years later is the painful issue of Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. There are other cases such as Côte d’Ivoire, which is a ticking time-bomb”.

To these Gumede should have added the growing “economic domination” of many African countries by China, or the mess the United States left behind after its attempted “military conquest” of Somalia. The latter country first became a geopolitical pawn in the cold war between the US and the Soviet Union in their quest to control the Horn of Africa. The US maintained good relations with the murderous regime of Siad Barre until he was ousted, the country disintegrated into lawless anarchy and the US fled tail-between-its-legs after its “Black Hawk down” tragedy at the hands of marauding war lords.

Today the US has indirectly returned to Somalia, supporting one faction in the conflict there against the Islamist movement al-Shabaab, which is blamed for the deepening crisis. But this time the US military is not openly involved. Instead, according to a number of respected media sources, Washington has sent Richard Rouget, a French-born mercenary to  Mogadishu  to  head a 40-man team of “mentors” who are training a “peace-keeping” force in Somalia. Rouget works for a private Washington-based security company and has a criminal record and suspected ties to several African coups and a murder. He also once was the right-hand man of erstwhile mercenary supremo Bob Denard.

Former British, French and, sadly yes, South African soldiers are among those working with him. The US State Department is funding Rouget’s company, yet everybody knows to what destructive levels these type of clandestine US operations usually develop.

African countries also refused to allow the US to base its military Africa Command – one of ten US Armed Forces regional commands around the world – on African soil. Instead it was forced to base the command in Germany “until 2012” when it will review the situation.

General William E. Ward, commander of US Africa Command, has recently paid several visits to Botswana as part of sharply increased military cooperation between the two countries. It was that and the rumour that the US was to set up a base in Botswana which led South Africa’s ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema to make his infamous statement regarding his organisation’s support for regime change in Botswana, a statement that now has him in trouble with South Africa’s ruling party.

Meanwhile, a group calling itself Concerned Africans, of which Vusi Gumede is a member, has authored an open letter to all the peoples of Africa and the world, drafting it within the context of the United Nations’ having failed the world, and particularly Africa, through taking inappropriate decisions.

“As concerned Africans we have no choice but to stand up and reassert our right and duty to determine our destiny in Libya and everywhere else on our continent,” writes Gumede. He points out the ingenuous manner in which Nato interpreted and implemented the UN Security Council resolution to impose a “no-fly zone” over Libya, a decision into which South Africa had also naively been suckered into supporting. (See last week's Notes from Africa).

Along with South Africa, many African countries and the other BRICS countries all condemned France and Britain’s arrogant move to use only military means instead of the proclaimed “use of all means” to protect Libyan civilians, and their further move to shift the campaign from protecting civilians to implementing regime change at all costs in Libya. In the end many, many civilians were killed – not protected – by Nato’s relentless bombing campaign, with Libya’s vast oil resources of course being the ultimate prize.

Ironically it was the UN in which Africa’s greatest living leader, Nelson Mandela, had such faith when international deliberations were under way as to whether or not the US and Britain should invade Iraq to rid it of its alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction...weapons it never had.

At the time Mandela said: “There is one compromise and one only, and that is the United Nations. If the United States and Britain go to the United Nations and the United Nations says we have concrete evidence of the existence of these weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we feel that we must do something about it, we would all support it.”

Britain and the US eventually did as they pleased anyhow – they invaded on the basis of their lie and the pretext that they would save millions of lives by doing so. On a similar pretext of humanitarian aid and saving lives, Britain and France abused the UN Security Council resolution to invade Libya and effect regime change. Several commendable initiatives by the AU in which South Africa played a leading role and which sought a negotiated settlement in Libya that would avoid a bloodbath, were simply ignored by Britain, France and their Nato allies. Africa was not allowed the space to bring about an African solution to an African problem.

“Therefore Africa and the developing world are right to be abhorred, as Libyans are Africans and are part of the developing world that has suffered a lot under imperialism and colonialism. Libyans have paid, and will continue to pay, with their lives for the Western agenda of regime change,” writes Gumede. Indeed.

Notes from Africa

Walking the unemployment walk


By Stef Terblanche

(This column appears every week in Leadership magazine (online) under the title "Out of Africa".)

In the beautiful Mara Region of north-western Tanzania, between Lake Victoria and the Serengeti National Park, live the Ngoreme people who have a saying: “If you refuse the elder’s advice, you will walk all day”. The implicit meaning of that should be quite clear to anyone. Well, to most.

Why then ask for advice if you are going to refuse it and end up walking all day? Perhaps certain members of the South African government – and many members of South Africa’s vocal labour unions – should be sent to the Mara Region to consult with the Ngoreme elders in the hope of getting an answer to that age-old question. Perhaps it will also help solve South Africa’s unemployment crisis.

For this is the kind of anomalous contradiction with which South Africa is again faced regarding its critical inability to create jobs.

Just this week Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe woke up to the fact that we are all sitting on a ticking time-bomb – a threat of frightening proportions that we have been writing about for quite some time. After a somewhat denialist South African government had ignored or down-played this threat for years, Molanthe this week boldly held up the Arab spring of youthful uprisings as a dire warning for South Africa.

"Our country is not insulated from these challenges especially because we have close to 2.8-million young people between ages of 18 and 24 who are unemployed and not in any institution of learning. This statistic represents the ticking time bomb that threatens to inflame pent-up emotions within the youth if not urgently addressed,” said the Deputy President in an address to the conference of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies in Johannesburg. Perhaps that is why the ANC Youth League loves him so much.

Nonetheless, next (and this is not a Youth League trait) the Deputy President did the sensible thing: he asked the Jewish Board of Deputies for advice on how to create jobs and thus defuse this dreaded ticking time bomb.

"I believe that the South African Jewish Board of Deputies is well positioned to help us answer some of these challenges because of the skills, knowledge and influence your members wield in the South African economy," Deputy President Motlanthe said.

Just a week ago we wrote about the storm in a teacup that had developed around the hapless Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan, when he was seen to be offering advice on this question. The mainstream media, business and others on that particular side of the fence went into a frenzy when Gordhan spoke the words they loved to hear: South Africa must introduce a youth wage subsidy in order to stimulate employment of the youth, and, South Africa may have to reconsider its labour legislation if it hoped to achieve the government’s job-creation targets. And National Planning Minister gave a cautious and qualified nod of approval.

Predictably Gordhan was attacked most vitriolically by labour, even if it was all a little over the top, his remarks having formed only a minute and mostly off the cuff part of his speech to a conference of internal auditors. It was offered as little more than a vague suggestion, a stone in the bush type of thing. Nonetheless, good advice is still advice.

But it was not the kind of advice the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) wanted to hear. It was enough to make the labour leaders choke on their workers’ breakfasts, shouting that Gordhan’s intentions were “reactionary”, that he had joined a right-wing campaign to “expose the workers to more exploitation” and that they would fight any right-wing attempts to weaken existing labour laws.

This elicited some defence of Gordhan from the ANC when spokesman Jackson Mthembu said it was “disrespectful and contemptuous” of Cosatu to characterise Gordhan as such.

National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) general secretary Irvin Jim threatened to call on President Jacob Zuma to fire Gordhan for his “neo-liberal anti-worker" policies and said workers would meet the minister "in the streets" as they now considered him to be the new "enemy". All of this was to be expected from labour.

But what was perhaps not quite expected was the next move coming from Gordhan’s very own colleagues in the Cabinet, when, by way of a statement made by the very irrepressible Cabinet spokesman, Jimmy Manyi, Gordhan was given a dressing down of sorts. Stopping short of issuing a reprimand, Manyi said Cabinet had resolved to remind the public that the Department of Labour alone would lead the way on labour matters. Why then, Mister Deputy President, bother to ask anyone for advice?

Not that advice on how to solve South Africa’s unemployment problem has been in short supply. Apart from Gordhan’s cautious whisper in that direction, South African business leaders, would-be foreign investors, economists and business analysts, the World Economic Forum, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have all been giving the same advice to the South African government: change your restrictive labour laws to stimulate job creation and economic growth.

The latest Global Competitiveness Report - produced by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland - saw South Africa slipping eight places from 46th most competitive nation to 54th amongst the world’s top 139 countries as measured by $US GDP. One of the big reasons for its tumble was labour market efficiency and poor labour relations. The report put South Africa at a dismal 131st out of 139 nations for lack of flexibility in wage determination.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development came to pretty much the same conclusion in its World Investment Report. This past week the IMF’s Staff Report for the 2011 Article IV Consultation with South Africa also said South Africa's unemployment challenge is "significantly higher than in other emerging markets".

So, in the words of one exasperated opposition politician: what will it take for the government to take good advice and commit to a "pro-growth and pro-jobs" economic policy? If not, and if it continues refusing advice, it will surely end up walking more than just all day as envisioned by the Ngoreme people. The unemployed youth of South Africa, on the other hand, may stop walking altogether. Instead they may ominously start stomping their feet in a toyi-toying war dance.

Notes from Africa

There are other ways to say it...

Stef Terblanche

(This column is published weekly in Leadership magazine's online bulletin.)

I had better be careful what I say here this week.

These days in South Africa people like me are getting skinned alive, or worse even, they are being fired, their columns shredded and their ideas and thoughts bagged, zipped up and buried as if it were nuclear waste. All because of what they say, or rather write.

Problem solved? Wrong. Only one person’s particular articulation of a problem or issue has been done away with. And the sensibilities of only one party to what should have been a civilised debate among different parties have been soothed by what sometimes seems to be little more than a kneejerk reaction.

Such considerations, however, did not stop the hapless columnist of the The Sowetan, Eric Miyeni, from joining a number of (previously) esteemed colleagues like Jon Qwelane, David Bullard, Deon Maas and Kuli Roberts in journalism’s outer Siberia. It also did not prevent a minor shake-up in the South African media this past week with one editor departing and two new ones being appointed.

Snakes in the grass. People without front teeth. Eish! Nonetheless, journalism has always been a dangerous profession, if one can give such title to the doings of the Fourth Estate.

Messengers have always stood first in the firing line – poisoned or fed to the lions in Roman times; scalped by the Apache and other Native Americans; cooked and eaten by cannibals in the Congo; assegaied by the Zulus; shot, lynched or quartered by European settlers in Africa and the New World; banned and placed under house arrest by the apartheid rulers; hanged in Nigeria; and chased out of press conferences for being a “bloody agent” with “that white attitude” by Julius Malema, the Little King of the ANC Youth League.

Only three years ago the former editor of Egypt’s Al-Dustur newspaper, Ibrahim Eissa, was jailed for six months for the crime of speculating about then President Hosni Mubarak’s health. Yesterday the paper could finally take revenge when it gloated “Egypt’s revolution has won” in response to an ailing Mubarak dressed in prison clothes being wheeled into a courtroom cage on a hospital stretcher to stand trial for murder, corruption and other charges. The wheel turns, and the pen grinds...

And yet, while people like Malema frequently profess to hate and despise the scribes of the modern world who prise into their affairs and lay bear what they would rather keep hidden, they cannot live without them. Just imagine how insignificant Malema, or Bob Mugabe, or the Queen of England for that matter, would have been without any media to affix them firmly in the public mind.

That is not to say that journalists, and particularly columnists, have unlimited licence to say what they like about anybody that meets their fancy. Everybody knows – or should know – that the pen is mightier than the sword. But when its tip has been dipped in an overdose of poison ink, it takes on a deadly and self-destructive menace.


While South Africa’s much hailed Constitution is widely seen as one of the most liberal in the granting of freedom of speech, this freedom, like any other, is balanced by certain obligations, or limitations. In South Africa’s case Section 16 of Chapter 2 of the Bill of Rights extends freedom of speech to the press and other media; freedom to receive or impart information or ideas; freedom of artistic creativity; and academic freedom and freedom of scientific research.


It limits this freedom not to include propaganda for war; incitement of imminent violence; or advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm. To this should have been added “or when it transcends the reasonable bounds of common decency”.


Just like Malema was once willing to die for Jacob Zuma, I am willing to die – well, maybe – for the right of everyone, including especially journalists, to share freely their thoughts, information, knowledge and ideas. But it is the way in which one presents those ideas and thoughts that is the issue here.


One can roast a turkey to cinders and it will leave a bad taste in the mouth and churn the stomach; or you can cook it with care and consideration, and it will be appreciated by most, even those who don’t necessarily like its taste. (That is not really an African saying, it’s just something I sort of made up...but the reader will get my drift.)


In Miyeni’s case he called City Press editor Feriel Haffajee a black snake in the grass and an agent of white capitalists who, if it were the 1980s, would have been “necklaced” with a burning tyre around her neck. Harsh stuff and all because Miyeni disliked Haffajee’s paper having had the audacity to expose Malema’s money-spinning private trust that requires a few questions to be answered. Not unlike Malema’s own song-and-dance call to the youthful masses to kill the Boer, you might say.


In a homophobic attack Qwelane stomped heavily on gay toes. Roberts said coloureds were violent people without front teeth who “breed as if Allan Boesak sent them on a mission to increase the coloured race”. Bullard made a few unflattering statements about Africans and colonialism. And Maas included Satanism in a call for tolerance when writing for a largely conservative, God-fearing readership. All could probably have said it differently, and their points would still have been taken...minus the hullabaloo and them losing their jobs or columns.


Whether it was really necessary to fire journalists or have the resignation of an acting editor, who was not even on duty when Miyeni’s column went to print, is another matter. Perhaps clearer guidelines and better editorial supervision would be the answer.


Nonetheless, these days the line between what is appropriate and inappropriate has become extremely blurry, worsened by the ascendancy of citizens’ journalism, social media, bloggers, and free-for-all debates and online comments by readers of news stories. While this may arguably make it more complicated to determine the merits and bounds of a case like Miyeni’s, it should be the responsibility of the formal media and its professional journalists to set the example and standards in this world of instant exchanges of thoughts and opinions.


There are certain moral obligations such as standards, decency, sensitivity and responsibility that should weigh heavily on all journalists, in addition to reporting truthfully, balanced and without favour or fear. Which brings me to something else.


When clearing out some news clippings and notes left over from the recent local government elections, I came across the following jewel. Commenting on SABC TV on the incoming election results, Eusebius McKaiser, political commentator and radio talk show host among other things, reported at one stage that the Democratic Alliance had won 68% of the counted vote in the Western Cape, followed “closely” by the ANC with 24%.


Well, one man’s yard is another man’s inch. Ask any fisherman!

Notes from Africa

A choice between deviants and greatness

As the world this week celebrates with Nelson Mandela his 93rd birthday, it is perhaps appropriate to look at the question of leaders and leadership in Africa, and particularly in South Africa.

In a keynote address delivered recently at a Black Management Forum (BMF) function in Richards Bay, author and academic Prince Mashele referred to Mandela and former South African President Thabo Mbeki as “two inspirational leaders” who “through their integrity and intellectual capabilities provided leadership to South Africans in a manner that made other Africans submit to their leadership”.

Yet in the same address, Mashele also touched on a raw nerve: the image of Africa as a savage continent, its countries being at the bottom of the global economic system as former World Bank economist Paul Collier unflatteringly wrote in his book The Bottom Billion.

More often than not Africa is portrayed in the Western media as a conflict and disease ridden continent led by corrupt leaders who do nothing to alleviate the suffering of its impoverished masses. Quite often, it would seem, this happens to be true. Just think of leaders such as Uganda’s Idi Amin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the former Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, or South Africa’s Hendrik Verwoerd (the latter not really an African, was he?).

Are these then the kind of leaders that are to be associated with Africa, or the collective African image? Certainly not. These are the deviants, just like every other continent in the world has produced its fair share of deviants. Europe gave us Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini among others. South America produced Somoza Garcia, Augusto Pinochet, Manuel Noriega and many more.

To equate African leadership with failure, repression and corruption would be to deny the global legacy of integrity, generosity, reconciliation, and reason bestowed by Mandela, or the intellectual capabilities of a Mbeki. There were many others like them, such as the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Seretse Khama in Botswana, and in South Africa the likes of Albert Luthuli, Albertina Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Desmond Tutu, Steve Biko and many more.

Like any other continent in the world, Africa has both is deviants and its greats. This brings one to South Africa and some tricky questions of leadership that are under the spotlight this week.

As a leading nation in Africa, and as the continent’s biggest economy, every move by its leaders, particularly its president, is keenly watched here and around the world. And this week its president, Jacob Zuma, will be closely watched for the kind of leadership he projects and the choices he makes.

For it is expected that Zuma must act on the damning report by the country’s Public Protector, Advocate Thuli Madonsela, who called on him to take action against his national police commissioner Bheki Cele and his public works minister Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde for their role in a leasing scandal that would have cost taxpayers a staggering R1.7bn.

Zuma is also under pressure from the public, the media, opposition parties and even his political allies like the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) to take action against corruption, including against Cele and Mhalngu-Nkabinde as well as against other allegedly corrupt politicians like Co-Operative Governance Minister Sicelo Shiceka, Northern Cape ANC chairman John Block and Nelson Mandela Bay ANC chairman Nceba Faku. Thus far Zuma seems to have avoided making the hard decisions, but the pressure has grown, and Madonsela’s report has presented him with an inescapable challenge.

There are two options available to him. One is presented by the inimitable Mac Maharaj, that struggle veteran, political Jack of all trades and Zuma’s newly appointed official voice. It is the same Mac who joined Mo Shaik several years ago to falsely finger Zuma’s persecutor and prosecutor, Bulelani Ngcuka, as an apartheid spy. Both have since been rewarded with cushy jobs by Zuma.

Nevertheless, Maharaj offers Zuma an out in the form of “ANC tradition”. Asked by a Sunday newspaper why Zuma, for instance, has not fired Shiceka – who irregularly squandered R300,000 in taxpayers’ money to visit his jailed drug smuggler mistress in Switzerland – Maharaj offered “ANC tradition” as the reason, saying the president’s “deep reluctance...to kick a person who is ill” comes from a common ANC tradition to care for its people, even if they find themselves on the wrong side of decency or the law it seems.

The other side of the coin is offered by another ANC colleague of Zuma’s, none other than ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe. For it was Mantashe who this past weekend joined the likes of Cosatu’s Zwelinzima Vavi in their condemnation of corruption in the ANC and government when he presented a nine-page document to the mid-year lekgotla of the ANC’s national executive committee in which he slammed ANC leaders’ inaction on corruption.

Despite being long-time close allies, Mantashe effectively threw down the gauntlet to Zuma to stop being soft on corruption and to take action. Mantashe cited the “huge damage done to the image” of the ruling party by its leaders simply dismissing the many “high profile cases” of allegations of corruption against “our comrades”.

Which begs the question: will Zuma this week choose the Maharaj option or the Mantashe option? Will he choose for Africa’s deviants, or for its greats? Watch this space.

Meanwhile, we wish you a happy birthday Madiba. May the spirit of everything you represent and stand for continue forever to inspire our great continent and this wonderful country, and may our greats bury the deviants.
Stef Terblanche

Notes from Africa

Two countries, two presidents and a Mac
(This column appears weekly in Leadership magazine's online bulletin.)

Tuesday 12 July 2011

By Stef Terblanche
A tale of two countries – and two presidents, mind you - has been unfolding in the far north of the African continent this week. In both cases the continent’s southernmost country, South Africa, has played and continues to play, a leading role.

This weekend South Sudan formally achieved its hard-won independence after a 22-year long bloody conflict, making it the world’s newest and Africa’s 54th state. It also ends Sudan’s reign as Africa’s largest state, a distinction that now falls to Algeria, with the Democratic Republic of Congo moving into second place.

A leading figure in achieving South Sudan’s “peaceful” transition to statehood has been former South African president Thabo Mbeki.

Meanwhile, civil war compounded by foreign intervention, continues in (northern) Sudan’s north-western neighbour, Libya. This past week saw Russia looking for a speedy end to the conflict when it engaged in discussions with NATO – whom it accuses of overstepping the UN mandate for international intervention to protect Libyan civilians – and South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma.

President Zuma has made it his mission to seek an African solution for the Libyan conflict. Although his government supported the UN mandate for aerial intervention, he now says the Western allies have misinterpreted it and are abusing it. He has subsequently been hard at work trying to get the African Union’s road map for peace in Libya adopted and implemented.
But while the NATO allies are arrogantly thumbing their noses at Zuma and the AU, Russia last week importantly promised him support. China, with ever-growing vested interests in Africa, already has questioned the NATO campaign and is also likely to back Zuma and the AU.

Ironic it is that these two peace missions are being led by two South African presidents who not long ago could themselves have done with an international peace mission to resolve their own political conflict when Zuma replaced Mbeki in something just short of a palace revolt. Could it be that international conflict resolution is the new stage for their ongoing political brinkmanship?

The story of South Sudan does not end here though. Among the many issues still confronting it is the spill over impact of the conflict in the Darfur region in northern Sudan (in which South Africa is also playing a peace-seeking role); the threat to regional peace created by the growing international Nile River dispute over access to one of the region’s scarcest resources, water; the tensions between northern Sudan and South Sudan over border disputes which already led to violence; the obligation on South Sudan to share oil revenue with the north as part of their secession agreement and which could create future tensions; the possible impact of Africa’s worst drought in 60 years in the Horn of Africa region which threatens famine for 10 million people; having to deal with northern Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide; transforming South Sudan’s liberation movement into a political party that will move away from past abuses and atrocities to embracing an inclusive democratic state model; and many more.

Mbeki has played an impressive role in ending the 22-year old armed conflict here and securing a largely peaceful transition to the formation of the new state. As the leader of the AU’s High-Level Implementation Panel on Sudan, Mbeki also intervened successfully when the north recently militarily attacked the disputed border town of Abyei.

Mbeki’s passion for peace in Africa is understandable: it is a precondition for his much cherished dream of an African Renaissance.

Whether Zuma will enjoy the same success in Libya, remains to be seen. This nut may be a bit harder to crack, mainly because of the Western allies’ disingenuous interference here. One suspects it is driven by oil greed on the allies’ part and French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s rather dubious agenda (he has armed Libyan rebels in contravention of the UN mandate among other things).

However, NATO’s military intervention has been dressed up as concern for Libyan lives threatened by that mean old shade-wearing rock star dictator, Muammar Gaddafi (the furthest thing from a military colonel I’ve ever seen). It was left to Russia last week to tell the NATO allies that their cynical bombing campaign is costing as many Libyan civilian lives as Gaddafi’s forces may have taken.

One certain victim of the current Libyan conflict has been the credibility of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. While it openly admits it has yet to find evidence on which to base charges, it has already just about found Gaddafi guilty of all sorts of atrocities, lynched him publicly through the media, almost effectively condemned him to death and issued a warrant for his arrest. Shades of Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction?
Meanwhile the issue of Gaddafi’s arrest warrant is another distinction Libya shares with Sudan. It is only the second arrest warrant ever issued by the ICC for a sitting head of state – the other being for northern Sudan’s al-Bashir.

The Libyan conflict has all the makings of being part genuine civil war, part covert insurrection by dubious rebels armed and motivated by Western nations with questionable interests. With the conflict being largely between its western and eastern regions, the Sudan option may be a solution. But whether Zuma and the AU will have Mbeki’s stomach for that one is another question.

Finally, talking of Zuma brings to mind another rather quirky matter: in Africa, it seems, one can’t put a good Mac down.

There are many kinds of Macs in Africa, of course. There’s the beloved raincoat brought here by the British and that American burger Mac. And then of course there’s that other Mac, the one and only Mac Maharaj.

After a short silence following a somewhat bloodied nose in the Bulelani Ngcuka “apartheid spy” saga, the former liberation trench fighter, Robben Island prisoner, transport minister and political Jack of all trades has bounced back onto centre stage – this time as Zuma’s newly appointed spokesman.

It may be remembered that it was the inimitable Mac and Mo Shaik who falsely accused the then chief prosecutor Ngcuka of having been an apartheid spy. Of course, Ngcuka at the time was investigating Zuma for arms deal corruption.

In a maccy twist to the tale, it seems now both Mac and Mo have been handsomely rewarded by Zuma: Mo by being made Zuma’s spy chief, and Mac by becoming Zuma’s voice. Let’s hope it helps him achieve peace in Libya.

Copyright 2011 Stef Terblanche