Daily Dispatch

Citizens you are on your own

IT WOULD be laughable if the implications were not so awful – a grinning President Jacob Zuma on the one hand blathering on to SADC leaders about peace and security in the region, while on the other hand allowing the criminally implicated Grace Mugabe to sneak out of the country.

Make no mistake, amidst the massive international hullabaloo over her alleged sjambokking of a 20-year-old South African citizen – and an odd little cold war between SAA and Air Zimbabwe – there was be no way that Zimbabwe’s First Lady would get diplomatic immunity unless the nod was given at the top.

Morally deficient does not begin to describe the failure of the Zuma government to do what it was supposed to do – protect its own citizens and ensure that the law was applied equally and fairly.

The day Mugabe was allowed to leave our soil without so much as an apology, let alone a court appearance, was no ordinary day for South Africa. It was not just another day of being confronted by obscene corruption and state capture by a criminal elite.

Rather, the day on which our government waved Mrs Mugabe goodbye after conspiring in a protracted cover-up, they hung a young South African out to dry.

And in doing so they sent out a loud message to the ordinary people of this country. It said: citizens you are on your own.

The Grace Mugabe crisis was a defining moment for our leadership. They could have chosen to step up and show themselves ready to attach value to a little known young woman who had clearly been beaten to a bloody pulp.

Or they could kick to her to the curb in the interest of a powerful outsider. The choice of the latter was despicable. South Africa already has an embarrassing record of standing quietly by as President Robert Mugabe has fiddled his election results and brutalised his people.

Now these chickens have come home to roost and they’re doing so right inside our borders.

SADC leaders were gathered in Pretoria this weekend, ostensibly to discuss the important issues hampering development in southern Africa, the lack of industrialisation among them. What an utter sham. The answers were right there under their noses in the demands of the protesters outside the summit venue.

They called on South Africa to set an example in its handling of the Grace Mugabe debacle. They called for decisive action after SA allowed Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir in and out of this country despite the ICC warrant for his arrest. They called for DRC President Joseph Kabila to step down. And they expressed disappointment at the SADC’s failure to address Zambia’s state of emergency – imposed by President Edgar Lungu who is rapidly turning his country into dictatorship, halting parliament, suppressing the media and detaining the opposition on trumped up treason charges.

If SADC leaders are remotely serious about overcoming regional development challenges they need to start by looking at the faces in SADC’s leadership mirror.