Perspective: Africa (Sep 2016) Perspective: Africa (Sep 2016) | Page 32

Perspective: Africa - September 2016

intervene or put human-rights or economic-policy conditions on aid, they are
accused of being imperialistic and patronising.

other – and if the root cause is perpetually
diagnosed as what happened centuries ago
then we are helpless to solve it.
After Mandela’s short five years in office
came Thabo Mbeki who ardently embraced and encouraged the elitist, defensive, unconditional unity embodied by
the AU. Incredibly, he still considers his
unwavering support for Robert Mugabe
to be one of his biggest triumphs, despite
the huge cost to the Zimbabwean people
and the burden on South Africa which
has had to absorb three million desperate
Zimbabwean refugees into its stressed
economy. Mbeki never viewed the conflict
in Zimbabwe as being Mugabe versus the
human rights and democratic will of the
Zimbabwean people; he saw it as Africa
versus the West.

Former US president Bill Clinton was
wracked with guilt over the Rwandan
genocide which he considers one of the
great failures of his foreign policy; he formally apologised to the Rwandan people
– but I cannot recall any African leaders
expressing any guilt, taking responsibility
or offering similar apologies, or even simple regret, for their inaction.
African Union solidarity is reserved for the
governing elites and not for the people.
This is why the organisation has proved so
relentlessly useless: most African leaders are
part of the problem and therefore cannot
be part of the solution unless they disempower themselves and pay back the billions
they have stolen. Fat chance.

Mbeki’s paranoid obsession with the West
spawned his outlandish views on HIV/
AIDS and resistance to anti-retrovirals on
account of their toxic side effects which he
seemed to see as some sort of racist plot
(never mind that chemotherapy and radiation therapy for cancer also have toxic side
effects but are the best the medical profession can currently offer). His public health
policy contributed to the deaths of 300
000 South Africans and the orphaning of
more than a million children. Neither he
nor the ANC has ever offered an apology
to the South African people and he continues to defend his bizarre views on HIV/
AIDS.

The election of Nelson Mandela birthed
the promise of a different attitude and
foreign policy on our continent – one
based on human rights rather than reflexive, unconditional defence of every African
dictatorship. After all, it is contradictory
to argue the obvious – that Africans have
the same potential as other human beings
– but then to hold them to a patronisingly lower standard of governance and
human-rights observance on account of
a brutal colonial past. Africa is not the
only continent that has been subjected to
foreign invaders and therefore we cannot
keep using colonialism and racism as an
excuse to explain our laggard, pathetically
unequal development and lack of respect
for human rights. The reality is that every
inhabited continent has been a brutal mess
for millennia – tribes, clans, city-states,
countries and empires at war with each

Mbeki reminds me of some Jews I know
who still refuse to buy German products
as though current generations of Germans
are responsible for genocidal choices made
before they were born. Times change. It is
illegal to be a Nazi in Germany and people
are imprisoned for denying the holocaust.
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