Kaizer Nyatsumba: Commonwealth must denounce political thuggery
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Your support makes all the difference.President Thabo Mbeki has long bemoaned the fact that the world still saw his continent as being "home to an unending spiral of anarchy and chaos, at whose unknown end is a dark pit of an utter, complete and unfathomable human disaster".
Mr Mbeki has spoken passionately about the positive changes in Africa since 1990 (more than 25 sub- Saharan countries have held democratic elections), and he has lamented the fact that the West still has a negative view of the continent.
"The African Renaissance is upon us," Mr Mbeki told a US conference in 1997. "What we have been talking about is the establishment of genuine and stable democracies in Africa, in which systems of governance will flourish because they derive their authority and legitimacy from the will of the people.
"The way forward must be informed by what is common to all African traditions: that the people must govern!"
The Mbeki-authored African Renaissance programme became the New African Initiative, before finally being rechristened the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad).
Today, Mr Mbeki – part of a troika of Commonwealth leaders to decide on action against Zimbabwe because of the patently unfree and unfair presidential election – is in the spotlight. That very international community which he has been trying to convince that Africa has turned a new leaf, and whose partnership is needed for Nepad to succeed, now waits to hear if he will prove to be equal to his words.
Will Mr Mbeki and his Nigerian counterpart, Olusegun Obasanjo, agree with the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to impose Commonwealth sanctions against Robert Mugabe? Will they unequivocally denounce the flagrant violation of human rights that preceded the election and the attempts made by the Mugabe government in the past few days to prevent the full expression of the Zimbabwean electorate's will?
For Africa's sake, for South Africa's sake, for Mr Mbeki's and Nepad's sake, we should hope that they will, because what Mr Mugabe and his Zanu-PF thugs have done over the past few days, – just as they have done systematically over the past two years – has been a terrible embarrassment to Africans.
The legitimate need for land reform in Zimbabwe cannot – and should not – be allowed to excuse the behaviour of Mr Mugabe's government since the Movement for Democratic Change first presented a threat to his stranglehold on power.
A failure by Presidents Mbeki and Obasanjo to do the right thing is likely to kill whatever hopes may once have existed that Africa, through Nepad, was on the verge of a new beginning.
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