By Greg Mills and Gwyn Prins

From voting with Burma and Iran to active diplomacy lending long-term comfort and support to Robert Mugabe, the image and direction of South Africa’s foreign policy is today bewilderingly far removed from Nelson Mandela’s 1993 hope that human rights would be the light that guided its foreign policy.  

What motivates South Africa’s leaders to take the positions they currently do in international affairs? Are calculations being actively made to balance interests between ideological priorities and the country’s needs of trade, investment and international influence? On the evidence, one must be sceptical.

Take Zimbabwe. If policy was based principally on national self-interest, Pretoria should act quite differently towards Harare and give that robust leadership that regional leaders sought but did not find in Lusaka. Supporting Mugabe in the face of his peoples’ electorally-expressed will, has been immensely costly to SA’s and President Mbeki’s image at home and abroad. It also carries burgeoning costs to SA’s economy, and increasingly puts Pretoria at odds with its region.

Mr Mbeki has rhetorically attempted to restore normality to Zimbabwe’s politics by encouraging Mr Mugabe down the path of electoral politics. Nothing inherently wrong with that, even though it amounts to too little too late in the day of hyper-inflation, ratcheting state-violence by Harare, and a disintegrating social order.

But this has apparently been derailed by the octogenarian’s desire to hang onto power at any cost, and by the unwillingness of Pretoria to contemplate tougher measures to keep the electoral process honest and on track. It’s not because those levers do not exist. They span a spectrum from tougher language through to switching off the taps of electricity and fuel to more openly interventionist options. SA did just this once before to compel change in Rhodesia. Today, to many Mr Mbeki appears to be more interested in the welfare and dignity of Zimbabwe’s leader than its people.

And it’s not as if Pretoria has been unsupported in succouring Mugabe, and from the most unlikely quarters. By leveraging international morality, humanitarian agencies have provided life-support to a most immoral regime by removing the link of responsibility between the food needs of its populace and the government’s actions.

If there is a sentence that illuminates the puzzle in Pretoria’s foreign policy, it is the relationship between Mugabe and the liberation narrative of the African National Congress.

If there is a word that explains its motives, it’s solidarity.

If there is a solution to the tensions between doing the right thing by the party and country, it’s separating the interests of any single party from that of the state. In short, good governance and the separation of powers. This is fundamentally about what sort of country you would like to be and finding the means to make this happen.

Foreign policy in integral to that task. South Africa lives in the region of the world with the worst peace-building capacity on the planet. The country’s regional strategic context cannot be avoided. Even if South Africa may not be interested in regional security crises like Zimbabwe they are interested in South Africa.

From Zimbabwe, it would appear that Mr Mbeki’s ANC wants South Africa to be seen both as a liberator and as the liberated: a country attempting to reinforce the party’s credentials from its anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle. The paradox is, of course, that protecting the party’s self-image and perpetuating liberation narratives too often trumps doing the right thing: witness Pretoria’s support for dictatorships over democracy. It has exposed the government’s weakness and sensitivities on questions of race in its reactions to the involvement of other powers in even commenting on Zimbabwe.

Is there a cost? For the moment, the world is preoccupied with making peace in Iraq and Afghanistan and dealing with issues of nuclearisation in faltering economies. So Pretoria gets, for the most part, a free pass, even though its hand-holding with Harare at the very least dims the sparkle of its once-considerable foreign reputation.

But ultimately there will be a price to pay for cosying up to autocrats. The price will be paid in the poisoning and enfeeblement of SADC and to some extent the African Union, by the continuing failure to deal with gross misuse of power in Zimbabwe in the way that West Africa is dealing with the abuses of Charles Taylor. As a result, Taylor is now awaiting trail before the International Criminal Court for his crimes against humanity; meanwhile Liberia moves forward.

The power, wealth and institutions underpinning Mugabe and his clique need to be decisively removed. Then Zimbabwe can start to recover from its near-death experience at his hands and the honour and credibility of the region likewise. If this does not occur, then SA’s Zimbabwe strategy would have been an unmitigated failure. It remains also the last chance for Mr Mbeki to rescue his presidency from ignominy.

Failure will bring more costs. Republican presidential aspirant John McCain has proposed a new way of managing international affairs through a League of Democracies. This club, built on like-minded values and political behaviour, would attempt to employ such a group’s economic and political status to their trade and investment advantage. Since liberal states have historically done better by their own people, the thesis goes, in terms of governance and the benefits of growth, so they will be able to provide both an exemplar and the tools for others to do the same.

Pretoria’s support for rogues is unlikely to assist its own efforts to provide security and development for all South Africans, the first aim of any responsible government. Nor is it likely to assist its aspirations to strengthen global governance through the UN; indeed, it may have the opposite effect by alienating the big-spenders. And it is unlikely to assist SA gain a place at the main-table – whether this be a permanent seat on the UN Security Council or an invitation to a League of Democracies.

If it were to fail over Zimbabwe, the only benefit Pretoria’s behaviour will give is comfort in the minds of its ideologues by preserving for a little longer the mythology of the party, its personalities, politics and its place in history. This era is ending, as Polokwane shows. It is in SA’s moral and material interest to hasten its closure, not to sustain it.

Dr Mills heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation; Professor Prins is a research professor at the London School of Economics.