Zuma’s silence endorses appalling message

PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma was inundated with requests for advice from fellow African leaders before the African Union ( AU) meeting held in Ethiopia at the weekend, or so he told business leaders at a gala dinner shortly before jetting out.

The reason he shared this little snippet was to make the point that while many South Africans in prominent positions apparently doubt his abilities, others on the continent look up to him. Mr Zuma did not, unfortunately, reveal what advice he gave his peers.

Doing so might have been useful, both to Mr Zuma’s appeal for more respect at home, and to South Africans’ understanding of SA’s position on the question of the continent’s relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC), the reason the special AU summit was called. As things stand, SA’s stance on this important issue remains as clear as mud.

Before the meeting Mr Zuma appeared to be carefully treading a middle path by avoiding supporting strident calls for AU members to withdraw from the Rome Statute that established the ICC in response to its alleged targeting of African leaders, while expressing the opinion that sitting presidents who were indicted should not have to sit through every day of their trials.

Then the majority of African leaders who attended the summit — just 14 out of a possible 54, according to insiders — took an unexpectedly hard line by demanding that serving heads of state should be

immune from prosecution and resolving that the cases against the presidents of Kenya and Sudan should therefore be deferred.

The AU does not release voting records, so we do not know how Mr Zuma voted. However, it would appear to be likely that he would have argued for a compromise that was more in line with his presummit position. The word from within the AU bureaucracy is that AU Commission chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who happens to be both a former South African foreign minister and Mr Zuma’s former wife, lobbied strongly to avoid any resolution that might lead to AU members withdrawing from the Rome Statute en masse.

That is all very well, but the fact is that by attending the summit and remaining mute after such a blatantly self-serving resolution was passed by so few African leaders — including Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta, who is obviously conflicted, and Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted for war crimes and refuses to co-operate with the ICC — Mr Zuma has, not for the first time, shown poor reputational judgment, and damned himself and SA by association.

The fact that only 14 African leaders attended the summit suggests that the majority may not want anything to do with what is being said and done in their name under pressure from Kenya and Sudan, but are not prepared to rock the boat. This is consistent with the way the AU has behaved in the past, and emulates the Southern African Development Community’s (Sadc) pathetic response to Zimbabwe’s defiance of the Sadc Tribunal, which was subsequently disbanded.

It is going to be extremely difficult for the AU to defend itself in future against accusations that it is little more than an old boys’ club dedicated to ensuring that dictators enjoy impunity. After taking a number of promising steps forward in recent years, the AU rolled way back by going ahead with this ill-advised summit and allowing a mere handful of leaders to pass such an illconsidered resolution in its name.

What incentive is there now for any one of the five African leaders who have each been in power for more than 30 years to ease their iron grip voluntarily? By choosing solidarity over justice for the victims of oppressors and cruel dictators, the AU has sent an appalling message to the rest of the world. Until we are told otherwise, that message now carries SA’s endorsement.