This week saw a sunrise in Cyril Ramaphosa’s reaction to the Zimbabwean crisis. He adds his visibility to this crisis discourse by appointing his Special Envoys in the person of Sydney Mufamadi and Baleka Mbete.
By SilentVoice WaTsvetai
Their terms of reference, amongst other things are to assess the level of truthfulness on the state brutalities and heavy handedness on citizens who seek to be heard, and also engage the Zimbabwean authorities on how they can address the deteriorating human rights and economic situation in Zimbabwe.
Political commentators, on the other side, are glorifying Ramaphosa’s response as a genesis of his commendable awakening to the Zimbabwean Crises. Civic Society groupings are optimistic about what may be delivered by the envoys in trying to cool the Zimbabwean temperature on human rights abuses that has been on an upward trend since the advent of ED Mnangagwa and Rtd Gen C G Chiwenga, an unholy alliance of military and civil power, at the helm of Zimbabwean politics. I remain pessimistic on the outcome of Ramaphosa’s intervention I would characteristically term the South African Inclusion in the Zimbabwean Crises. History has it in its archives and libraries are full of literature on the nature of outcomes from South African intervention. Trends are that it will not work; it is another mark on the furtherance of our crises, the Zimbabwean Crises. An abridged outline of past events is going to be employed to adjudge the position I am taking.
The Mbeki Intervention, in 2009, brought economic stability anchored on a deceptive and unreliable political dispensation. Mbeki created pseudo peace that later manifested itself in an uneven ground for the exercise of power and political free play by the then stakeholders to it. The net outcome was lack of perenniality in the solution, evidenced by political power monopoly by ZANU PF, a partisan judiciary and gross manipulation of the electoral system. The whole fiasco culminated in a heavily contested result of 2013 election.
We then had the Montlanthe Intervention, of 2018, that only served to authenticate ZANU PF brutality murder of innocent citizens. Motlanthe headed a commission whose results were predetermined and only meant to cool civilians’ anger and intolerance of the abuses meted on them by their rulers. He assisted to establish new meanings of peace and stability to mean reluctant obedience to oppression and prolonged endurance to the abusive regime, respectively. Again, Motlanthe’s mission was to write the new dispensation’s new constitution to rule by abductions, rape, torture and disappearances.
Again, this week, Ramaphosa adds on his deception to the citizens of Zimbabwe by sending Mufamadi, South Africa’s former head of security and Mbete B, who has enjoyed too much from the ANC rule – the Mufamadi and Mbete Intervention. These two people, in my view, are not independent of Ramaphosa’s chicanery treatment of the Zimbabwe crises case. In my opinion, the two envoys are not for anything good to the Zimbabweans as I feel they are coming to advise how the Zimbabwean government can apply cosmetics to the worsening situation while concealing the evidence of human rights abuses. They are coming to bribe the world as if addressing the oddities of the Zimbabwean authorities; legitimizing the terror on Zimbabweans – deferring citizens’ anger that has reached the highest levels again, with the state left with nothing but to resort to the army and the police to quell this level of discontentment.
Absolutely, there is nothing to expect from these South African envoys. Nothing at all!!
