By Teke Ngomba (Originally published onAfrica Files)
As the new Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua is sworn into office, Teke Ngomba looks back at South Africa's reaction to the flawed elections that swept the new President into Office.
Yar'Adua Taking the Oath of Office in Abuja
In 2005, the journal, International Affairs, published an article by James Barber titled ‘The New South Africa’s Foreign Policy: Principles and Practice.’ In the article, worth quoting at length here, James Barber (2005:1083-1084) recounts, among others that:
‘When Mandela came to power, Nigeria was under an authoritarian military regime led by General Sani Abacha. A protest campaign by the Ogoni people, who claimed that their land had been ruined by the oil industry, was broken by the regime and the leaders were arraigned before the military tribunal. They were found guilty of plotting a coup and attacking chiefs and ordered to be executed. Mandela, who saw the process as an infringement of human rights, attempted to restrain the Nigerians through diplomacy, including visits to Nigeria by Mbeki and Archbishop Tutu. At this point, in November 1996, Mandela attended his first Commonwealth Conference in New Zealand. On arrival, when questioned about Nigeria, he said he was sanguine about the situation.’
‘However, next day, news came that the executions had taken place. Furious and humiliated, Mandela called for action. Following his lead, the conference suspended Nigeria from the Commonwealth, but Mandela wanted more, including diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions and pointed the way by withdrawing the South African High Commissioner. He called on Western states to boycott Nigerian oil and summoned an extraordinary meeting of the SADC at which he called for coordinated pressure on Nigeria.’
Mandela’s efforts, James Barber notes regrettably, ‘produced nothing. The West continued to buy oil, and the African states had no appetite for confrontation. They saw Nigeria not as an abuser of human rights but as a continental leader which had supported other liberation struggles and was a major contributor to the OAU.’ African leaders, according to Barber ‘accused Mandela of breaking African unity. Indignantly, Liberia claimed that the ‘campaign against Nigeria is very shocking’ and called on others ‘not to allow South Africa to be used in undermining African solidarity.’ The Nigerians themselves described Mandela’s attitude as ‘horrific and terrible.’ Even at home, Mandela gained little support. After it was pointed out that Nigeria had given substantial financial support to the ANC’s electoral chest, the government started back-pedaling.’
According to Barber, ‘Mbeki told Parliament that South Africa must act not alone but in concert. He asserted that in Nigeria’s case, understanding was preferable to confrontation. Then, he accused the West of manipulating Mandela and trying to expose him to ridicule…’ In saying these, ‘Mbeki’, James Barber argues, ‘succeeded in moving attention away from the abuse of human rights in Nigeria to criticism of the West.’
That was in 1996. Fast-forward to 2007 and we are faced once more, with another official South African reaction to an issue that concerns Nigeria and borders on human rights- the 2007 presidential elections in Nigeria.
Mbeki Congratulates Nigeria’s Yar’Adua
If there is anything Nigerians agree on after the April 2007 parliamentary and presidential elections, it is that the elections were remarkably flawed. Both the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, outgoing President, Olusegun Obasanjo, contenders of the presidential elections and election observers, all agree that there were irregularities in the historic elections. Their differences however, lie in the categorization of the flaws and whether or not they were significant enough to necessitate a declaration of the ‘results’ of the elections as null and void. While the leaders of the opposition parities and some election observers believe the flaws warrant a cancellation of the elections as it, among others, trampled on the basic human right of Nigerians to freely choose their president, INEC and President Obasanjo think otherwise.
In an interview granted the BBC shortly after the proclamation of the contested results, President Obasanjo for example, acknowledged the irregularities during the elections and said ‘but in the magnitude they happened, they could not have made the elections null and void.’ Since INEC also believed the flaws in the elections could not warrant an outright cancellation, it went ahead and proclaimed the results, declaring Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the presidential candidate of the governing People's Democratic Party, winner of the presidential elections with 70% of the votes.
Mr. Yar’Adua, apparently conscious as well of the irregularities in the elections, has chosen to introduce a new diction in describing elections. He told the BBC on 25 April 2007 that he believes he won the elections ‘fair and square.’ Why he chose not to use the common ‘free and fair’ is obvious- no honest person will describe what transpired in the name of elections in Nigeria as ‘free and fair.’ With the opposition contesting the results and calling for street protests, Nigerians have, since the proclamation of these results, been in a state of uncertainty as they await the installation of Mr. Yar’Adua scheduled for 29 May 2007.
The remarkable silence of other African leaders to either condemn the elections or congratulate the ‘president-elect’ was broken on 25 April 2007 when President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa became the first president to officially congratulate Mr. Yar’Adua. According to South Africa’s Department of Foreign Affairs quoted by SABC, the national broadcaster, in his congratulatory letter to Mr. Yar’Adua, President Mbeki ‘expressed South Africa’s intention to forge closer working relations between the two countries’ and also wished that parties and candidates would use only constitutional means to redress grievances arising from the elections.
By taking the lead to congratulate Mr. Yar’Adua, President Mbeki implanted the first seeds of external legitimization of Mr. Yar’Adua and once more demonstrated, by not criticizing the conduct of the polls, his soft spot for the ‘chastise not thy friend’ ethos in diplomacy. Mbeki’s congratulation of Mr. Yar’Adua clearly substantiates his ‘diplomatic portrait’ painted by Gerrit Olivier in 2003 and resuscitates thoughts of his stance on the Zimbabwe saga. It also triggers mind-bugling thoughts about on-the-ground implications of adhering to the ‘chastise not thy friend’ ethos in diplomacy.
Mbeki’s Congratulation: Adhering to a Diplomatic Ethic
If there is anything Mr. Yar’Adua badly needs at the moment out of Nigeria, it is presumably external recognition and support from heads of state- and this he got first from Africa’s diplomatic and economic power house-South Africa. When one ponders why President Mbeki, an advocate of good governance and democracy in Africa will close his eyes to all the blatant irregularities in the presidential elections in Nigeria, and go on to deem Mr. Yar’Adua’s election as legitimate as to congratulate him already as the new president of Nigeria, one thing comes to mind: in so far as his stance is shocking, it is by no means surprising. President Mbeki, it could be said, was merely adhering to his diplomatic ethic.
In his insightful article in 2003 titled ‘Is Thabo Mbeki Africa’s Saviour?’ Gerrit Olivier underscores President Mbeki’s ‘predilection’ for foreign affairs, particularly African, and calls him ‘…the super diplomat who has succeeded in placing Africa high on the global agenda…and placed himself as South Africa’s and Africa’s one-man foreign policy think-tank’ (p. 815-816).
President Mbeki, as Olivier notes, is devotedly committed to NEPAD, AU, the Non-Aligned Movement and passionately believes in his ‘African Renaissance’ ideology. But he is also ‘a master of rhetorical obfuscation, who would at the same time criticize and embrace outdated political orthodoxy in Africa, and who also prefers to settle for weak compromises and procrastinate rather than challenge or over rule aberrant fellow African leaders’ (Olivier, 2003: 816). According to Olivier, under President Mbeki, the ruling ANC has modified its foreign policy credo form ‘aspirational moralism to operational pragmatism…with its moral neutrality and even indifference with regards to intra-African politics. It meticulously respects the sovereignty of African countries, viewing judgment on their human rights records, however odious and harmful as unwarranted interference in their domestic affairs’ (p. 817)
And so, recounts Gerrit Olivier, most of the time, (as demonstrated in deciding South Africa’s stance on the recent Nigerian elections) when President Mbeki ‘has to make a hard choice, his ideological predilections take over, leading him to act with moral indifference and to stand by ‘permanent friends’ of the ilk of Mugabe, Castro and Qadhafi’ (p. 818) So, while it is disheartening that President Mbeki did not explicitly condemn the irregularities in the Nigerian elections or even diplomatically ‘regret’ their occurrence, his action is by no means surprising. It is the same ethos he has regrettably adopted consistently, concerning the Zimbabwean case.
In 2003 in Abuja, President Mbeki clashed openly with President Obasanjo over Nigeria’s call for Zimbabwe’s suspension from the Commonwealth arguing that same year that he believes the current crisis in Zimbabwe ‘did not arise from the desperate actions of reckless political leadership or from corruption. It arose from genuine concern to meet the needs of the black population’ and so the best option, he maintained, was for South Africa to exercise ‘quiet diplomacy’ in encouraging dialogue between the Zimbabwean government and its internal political opponents. (Barber, 2005:1093)
In strict adherence to this belief and pooh-poohing all suggestions for South Africa to act otherwise with regards to the Zimbabwean situation, as Justice Malala noted regrettably in 2005, ‘even as police raze shacks in and around Zimbabwe’s cities- leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, Mbeki was not prepared to condemn Mugabe’ (cited in Barber, 2005:1093). He has refused to use South Africa’s ‘array of diplomatic instruments to exploit Zimbabwe’s vulnerability, its dependence on South Africa, to break the impasse’ in Zimbabwe (Olivier, 2003:823).
Obviously, adhering to this regrettable ‘chastise not thy friend’ ethos in diplomacy is not confined only to South Africa alone or only to Africa as a whole. China for example, is sealing its lips to overtly condemn the Khartoum government’s actions in Darfur because of its ‘friendly’ ties to Sudan as a result of heavy Chinese investment in the oil industry in Sudan.
Western countries have also historically adhered to this logic. In Africa for example, their notorious ‘friendly blind eyes’ cast on Congo’s Mobutu, helped to plunge the country into chaos. Out of Africa, given that Turkey for example, is an important ally of the west, western governments have generally ‘been cautious with their criticisms of Turkey and have as far as possible, avoided doing or saying things in public that would embarrass a valued ally. From an ethical perspective centered entirely on human rights, this looks- and indeed is highly unethical’ (Brown, 2002:185).
The Burning Question
President Mbeki’s congratulation of Mr. Yar’Adua, which literally sidelines the remarkable irregularities that characterized the elections, goes beyond a normal bilateral act between two friendly countries and raises a burning question in diplomacy which was succinctly put by Brown (2002:174): ‘Is it possible for any government’s foreign policy to be truly ethical?.’ To answer in the affirmative is not quixotic though as Chandler (2003:295-296) points out, the definition of an ‘ethical’ foreign policy and the means of its realization, remain the subject of disagreement among international relations analysts.
While building an ‘ethical’ foreign policy demands, among others, a broader focus on human rights issues which O’Neill (2003:227) calls ‘the principal ingredients of ‘ethical foreign policy’’, this task, to succeed, must start with basic human honesty and truth telling and thus warrants the shunning of the ‘chastise not thy friend’ ethos in diplomacy. It will definitely not come easily as seen in the reaction to Mandela’s honest stance against the actions of the Nigerian government in 1996. Neither will it come by running away from the truth as seen in President Mbeki’s failure to look his friend President Obasanjo in the eyes and tell him that what went on in Nigeria in April 2007 was by no means a free and fair election that could confer acceptable legitimacy to Mr. Yar’Adua whom, he has unfortunately, already congratulated.
Most often than not, where the ‘chastise not thy friend’ ethos in diplomacy has been put into use, it has often resulted in calamitous consequences for the civilian population in places such as Darfur and Zimbabwe, where civilians, weakened by the governments in place, depend on external pressure from friends of these regimes to help bring them out of the quagmire they find themselves in. Such a diplomatic ethos further betrays the commonsensical logic that true friendship borders on truth-telling and it is therefore, to put it bluntly, a turpitude.
References
Barber, J. (2005) The New South Africa’s Foreign Policy: Principles and Practice, International Affairs, 81, 5. pp: 1079-1096
Brown, C. (2002) On Morality, Self Interest and Foreign Policy, Government and Opposition, 37 (2) pp: 173-189
Chandler, D. (2003) Rhetoric without Responsibility: The Attraction of ‘Ethical’ Foreign Policy, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp: 295-316
Olivier, G. (2003) Is Thabo Mbeki Africa’s Saviour? International Affairs, 79, 4 pp. 815-828
O’Neill, O. (2003) ‘Ethical Foreign Policy’: Where does the Ethics Come From, European Journal of Political Theory, 2 (2) pp: 227-234
SABC News (26 April 2007) Nigeria's Yar'Adua gets backing, defends poll win, Available online. Accessed on 4 May, 2007
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