WHY HAS THE MUTE BUTTON BEEN PRESSED ON AFRICA?
RECENT crackdowns in several African countries have been met with a muted response from the international community. Should the West be doing more to protect democracy on the continent?
For even the most mildly superstitious souls it was an unsettling moment: the newly sworn-in president of the Democratic Republic of Congo was delivering his maiden speech when he was unable
to go on. “I am not OK,” Felix Tshisekedi declared.
Aides moved in to help and he was eventually able to resume. An adviser later reported that the new president’s flak-jacket was too tight and he had felt faint.
President Tshisekedi was standing near his predecessor, Joseph Kabila, whom many fear will continue to exert a powerful control over the government - a suffocating influence some have suggested after allegations, which have been denied, of a secret deal between the two.
The world looked at DR Congo, suspected a big electoral fix but decided to look the other way.
There was no appetite for confrontation on the part of the African Union (AU), the Southern African Development
Community (Sadc), the European Union or the United States.
The AU hastily convened and just as hastily abandoned a mission to DR Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, that had been intended to promote a negotiated solution to the row over electoral fraud.
The requests to delay the announcement of official results were ignored.
US contradiction
The AU was left with nothing to negotiate. For a regional body that promotes “African solutions to African problems” it was a humiliation.
The US ambassador to Kinshasa, Mike Hammer, hailed a “first-ever peaceful, democratic transfer of power,” in the process managing to look past the State Department’s own publicly expressed concerns over the electoral process. There was no easy answer to the dilemma presented by the vote. From early on it was clear that there were not going to be large demonstrations against the government, no great manifestation of public fury to pressure the international community into action.
This in part was to do with the fractured nature of the political opposition, fear of the security forces and the decision by the Catholic Church and civil society to refrain for now from large-scale mobilisation. Looking at all of this, the regional and international actors opted for what diplomats call “stability.” In DR Congo this means a continuation of the existing muddle while hoping that it does
not all collapse into disaster.
For the millions of Congolese - displaced from their homes by conflict, living with dire poverty and the threat of disease, denied a share in the immense mineral wealth of their nation, bullied and preyed upon by armed groups - do not expect an amelioration of their plight any time soon.
In all of this it is also worth considering what I would call the politics of preoccupation.
It is not just in relation to DR Congo but also to Zimbabwe with its crackdown on dissent and Sudan in the throes of a popular uprising against the regime of President Omar al- Bashir. The last few weeks have seen deepening repression. Soldiers in Zimbabwe terrorised their fellow citizens and their counterparts in Sudan fire live ammunition into crowds. Yet the international response has been muted, to put it mildly.
British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt called on Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa not to “turn the clock back.”
This statement was based on the assumption that the clock had moved forward in Zimbabwe since the ousting of Robert Mugabe at the end of 2017, a doubtful proposition just now.
Rather than condemn the brutality in Zimbabwe, the most powerful country in the region, South Africa, called for the lifting of economic sanctions.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has his own preoccupations.
There is the fight against corruption and for his political base within the governing African National Congress (ANC) where allies of his predecessor, Jacob Zuma, still lurk. Winning a handsome majority in the coming elections will strengthen Ramaphosa’s hand. Do not expect any emphatic foreign policy departures until he feels more secure. The other major continental power, Nigeria, is holding elections in which President Muhammadu Buhari is running for a second term.
Buhari recently caused uproar by firing his chief justice, who could have played a crucial role in a disputed election result.
The US, EU and the UK all sounded their displeasure. But after the example of DR Congo is there an appetite for anything more than words should the election go awry?
‘Ethical intervention’
In Britain foreign policy is consumed by the Brexit debate. Across the rest of the EU Brexit and a host of domestic crises have led to a turning inwards.
African political problems are not a priority.
How distant now the days of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “ethical foreign policy” and the sight of British troops patrolling Sierra Leone. The disastrous aftermath of the Iraq war ended that brief period of ambitious interventionism.
The French still maintain strong military and economic links in several African countries. But their limited, and purely rhetorical, response to the DR Congo election outcome indicates the priority of domestic issues like the ongoing “gilets jaunes” protests.
In America, the White House and the legislators are kept busy with the Mueller investigation, the continuing border wall saga and the 2020 elections
A month ago US National Security Adviser John Bolton outlined an Africa policy aimed at challenging the expansion of Chinese, and to a lesser extent Russian influenceı.-