African Leaders and Mugabe: A case of Sinners vs. Sinner

This was President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania welcoming Robert Mugabe and his entourage to the AU summit:

“We would like to congratulate the Zimbabwean people for their successes but we would also like to express our commiserations for their suffering.”

Many of those at the summit are just a different shade of Robert Mugabe! This is why Kikwete and other African heads of state could only offer muted response to the open expression of tyranny in Zimbabwe.

How many of heads of state at the AU summit got elected under free and fair elections? How many are free of impunity and abuse of power? Who amongst them isn’t afflicted with imperialistic mentality, and driven by personal motives?

Only few African presidents are free of this baggage, hence the muted response. According to Jendayi Frazier, the U.S. Assistant secretary of State:

“In the past, the issue in front of African leaders was how they were going to deal with governments that were coming to power through force of arms, now they are taking another step to say how do you deal with presidents who inaugurate themselves in faulty elections, not credible elections, and that is going to be a difficult issue because there have been a lot of elections that have not been the best, that have not been free and fair.”

This is why when Liberia, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Ghana pushed the AU to criticize Mugabe and the Zimbabwean bye-elections, their voices were met with “strong opposition from the many friends and admirers Mr. Mugabe has made in his long career, first as a leader of the movement to cast off white rule and, then, as a champion of land reform”, according to media reports.

This is why the Kenyan Prime Minister Odinga and Botswana government were ignored. Odinga called on the AU to eject Mr Mugabe from the summit, saying “he should be suspended until he allows the African Union to facilitate free and fair elections.” Botswana asked Mugabe “to be barred” from both the AU and southern African regional body, saying the presence of Mugabe “would give unqualified legitimacy to a process which cannot be considered legitimate.”

The inability of the AU to speak strongly and in clear terms against the tyrannical rule of Mugabe is another manifestation of the influence of the old gun clique which Mugabe rolls with. Unfortunately this limiting influence is bound to persist until Africa is rid of every one of those men.

After two days of deliberations the AU summit came to a close with little discussion on the main agenda of the event - the challenges of clean water and sanitation on the African continent; important topic needing urgent attention.

And for the much that was said about and on Mugabe, it yielded little: The summit ended with a call for dialogue between Mugabe and the opposition.

I ask, what sort of dialogue can happen with Mugabe…?

Mugabe has done everything humanly possible to remain in power, he’s a man whose only unfulfilled and remaining desire is to die in office wielding absolute power over his people; there is no room for dialogue in his game plan!