Sam Akaki says the tragedy in Zimbabwe blinds us to worse calamities afflicting other African nations

THE current crisis in Zimbabwe should not obscure the poverty and political violence across Africa. In his contribution to the recent House of Commons debate on Zimbabwe, Labour MP Chris Mullin said: “I spent two happy years as Africa minister at the Foreign Office, even though there were many enormous African issues to deal with – many of them bigger than Zimbabwe in terms of scale of catastrophe and human suffering, such as events in the Congo region, Angola, Sudan and Liberia. However, Zimbabwe occupied more of my time than any other issue.”

At the end of last month, Nelson Mandela echoed Mullin’s point when he brought a wider perspective to the current debate on the crisis in Zimbabwe which, tragic as the situation in that country is, ignores a catalogue of even more appalling crises across Africa. Mandela had been urged to speak out for some time, so his remarks at an after-dinner speech in London were widely welcomed.

The former South African President told an audience which included Gordon Brown and Bill Clinton: “We watch with sadness the continuing tragedy in Darfur. Nearer to home, we have seen the outbreak of violence against fellow Africans in our own country and the tragic failure of leadership in our neighbouring Zimbabwe.”
Sadly, this did not stop newspapers coming up with distorted headlines– as they have done before – to make Zimbabwe obscure other horrific events in Africa, especially over the past three years, where there has been a steady increase in election rigging followed by appalling violence across the continent.
Just six months ago in Kenya, incumbent Mwai Kibaki, who had actually lost the presidential elections, fixed the polling figures, precipitating the worst violence since the Mao Mao rebellion in the 1950s. Some 1500 men, women and children were slaughtered and more than 600,000 were displaced. Now, following a compromise deal, Kibaki, who won just 46 seats in Kenya’s parliament, is the executive President while Raila Odinga, his rival who won more than 100 seats, serves as his Prime Minister.

In April 2007, outgoing Nigerian President Olesegun Obasango described the forthcoming election as a matter of life and death, before going on to rig it in favour of his chosen successor, Umaru Yar’Adua. Leading opposition activist Atiku Abubakar, the former Vice-President, has disappeared into oblivion.
In October 2006, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the presidential election was re-run and finally decided in bloody gun battles between the forces controlled by President Joseph Kabila and those of his rival, Jean-Pierre Bemba. The latter was arrested in Belgium in May this year after being accused of war crimes by The International Criminal Court in The Hague.

In November 2005, three months before the elections in Uganda, President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni arrested his most formidable opponent, Kizza Besigye, and charged him with rape, terrorism and treason. Besigye was nominated as a presidential candidate while he was in prison. There years on, he is still awaiting trial on charges of treason, which is punishable by death.

And during the May 2005 elections in Ethiopia, government forces shot and killed 140 opposition politicians and their supporters. They subsequently locked up scores of journalists, students and at least 100 members of the national parliament who had refused to take up their seats in protests against the rigged elections.
All these recent crises are seemingly forgotten for now. But the countries which have been engulfed by them are sitting on time bombs likely go off at their next parliamentary and presidential elections. That would result in bloodshed even worse than that in Zimbabwe today.

Rather than responding with condemnation after every politically motivated crisis in Africa, Britain needs to develop a long-term strategy designed to help put the continent on the road to genuine democracy, lasting peace and sustainable development.

The first step is to recognise that the liberal democracy which we enjoy in this country did not come about overnight. It took centuries and landmark events, incluing the English Civil War and the Reform Act of 1832, which introduced wide-ranging changes to electoral franchise legislation. There was not universal suffrage in Britain until 1928.

So it is wholly unrealistic to expect young countries in Africa – Zimbabwe is just 28 years old – to have an idealised form of Western liberal democracy.
It should be recognised that democracy cannot take root or flourish anywhere without effective democratic institutions. For that reason, Britain should put less emphasis on exporting Western liberal democracy and focus on helping African countries to develop independent judiciaries, state security forces and civil services. Perhaps most of all, these countries need an independent electoral commission.

Today, almost all African leaders – not just Robert Mugabe – are able to steal funds, abuse human rights and rig elections with impunity, only because they are also personally controlling state institutions.

Concluding his contribution to the parliamentary debate on Zimbabwe, Chris Mullin put his finger on one reason why Britain is failing in Africa:
“The rapid turnover is a problem. I was this Government’s sixth Africa minister. Lord Triesman was the seventh and Lord Malloch-Brown is the eighth. We say that we care about Africa and we take Africa seriously, from the Prime Minister down, but the high turnover of Africa ministers means that no one has a consistent grip on African issues. For the past two years and more, the Africa minister has sat in the House of Lords.” Africa will dearly miss Mullin in the British Parliament when he retires at the next general election.

Meanwhile, on June 16, Mark Bowden, the United Nations’ humanitarian co-ordinator for Somalia, declared that Somalia faces “a worse situation than Darfur” and that “in the next three months, the number of people needing emergency food relief will climb by about one million from the current 2.5 million”.
Is Zimbabwe, where some 50 people have been killed and 2,000 displaced, worse than Somalia, Darfur, northern Uganda and eastern Congo where some five million people have lost their lives in the past four years as a consequence of war, starvation and disease?

As far as Zimbabwe is concerned, the only workable solution is for both Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai to step aside. Their respective roles have become too controversial within Zimbabwe, across Africa and internationally for any lasting peace to be established while they are involved in the country’s politics.

Driven by pride and prejudice against the British Government, Mugabe is likely to make good his threat to cling onto power until death. For his part, Tsvangirai has angered many African leaders by calling for an armed invasion of his country.

There is a precedent for a resolution. In Nigeria, in 1998, it was the simultaneous deaths through heart attacks of Sani Abacha, the then military dictator, and detained tribal chief Masud Abiola, who had won the 1993 elections, which left the way open for democratic elections which brought Olusegun Obasanjo to power. But lightning tends not to strike twice.

Sam Akaki is executive director of Democratic Institutions for Poverty Reduction in Africa