South Africa’s immigration crisis is the direct price of ‘quiet diplomacy’ towards Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe’s ruling party, Zanu-PF, enjoyed an unchecked majority in government from 1980 to 1999. A new political outfit, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was formed in 1999. This was during the “No” vote campaign which eventually led to the rejection of the proposed constitution in a referendum held in February 2000. Four months later, the MDC won 57 seats in parliament, while Zanu-PF managed 62. It was at this moment that Zanu-PF realised its grip on power was under real threat. Instead of interrogating the issues that had made people turn their back on it, Zanu-PF turned to violence. As many as 107 people were documented as murdered between March 2000 and March 2002. State repression, censorship and lawfare increased.

This is the environment that punctuated the 2002 presidential elections in Zimbabwe that pitted Robert Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai against each other. It is this same environment, coupled with the changing geopolitical dynamics, that pushed the then president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, to appoint a judicial observer mission (JOM) led by former high court judges Dikgang Moseneke and Sisi Khampepe. Its mandate was to observe whether the legal framework under which the elections in Zimbabwe took place qualified them to be considered free and fair.

The Khampepe Report produced by the JOM was scathing and concluded that, based on the cumulative pre-election departures from international standards, the Zimbabwean elections were not free and fair. This report was presented to Mbeki who decided not to publish the findings. He did not condemn the Zimbabwean elections. Instead, he chose to go with the report from the South African observer mission led by Sam Motsuenyane, which had concluded that the result should be considered legitimate given the high turnout and participation. It took 12 years of litigation for South Africa to finally make the Khampepe report public.

Mbeki did not reprimand Harare. Instead, he continued with his policy of “quiet diplomacy”. The corridors of South African power justified this on the basis of shared historical alliances during the liberation struggle; they also feared that publicising the Khampepe Report could give more ammunition to the West for more sanctions that could cripple Zimbabwe, resulting in economic collapse that could put both economic and immigration pressure on South Africa. These were legitimate concerns.

Quiet diplomacy did not seem to deter Mugabe and Zanu-PF. On the contrary, it seemed to embolden them even as the country dithered on the edge of economic collapse due to the post-election fallout and greater US and EU targeted sanctions on ruling party individuals.

In March 2008, Zanu-PF lost the parliamentary majority to the MDC. Mugabe himself lost to Tsvangirai, but he sat on election results for more than one month. During that time, Zanu-PF militia and the military engaged in a campaign of brutality across the country dubbed Operation Mavhotera Papi (“Where did you vote”). More than 500 people, including MDC youths such as Tonderai Ndira, were killed. Thousands were displaced.

As the violence escalated, Tsvangirai fled to Botswana. After all the waiting, the election commission declared that Mugabe had indeed lost but none of the candidates had crossed the 50% + 1 threshold. This therefore required a run-off election within three months.

This period became one of the darkest chapters in Zimbabwe since the genocide in Matabeleland. Thousands of people were tortured and maimed. Eventually, Tsvangirai withdrew from the election, citing the danger it was putting on innocent people.

Mugabe proceeded to conduct a run-off election in June 2008 alone and declared himself the legitimate president. As the brutal campaign raged on, many Zimbabweans fled to South Africa and Botswana. That was the beginning of the immigration crisis that South Africa is grappling with today.

During this period of brutality, Zimbabwe experienced its highest level of hyperinflation, which in November 2008 reached 79,600,000,000% per month, with the year-over-year annual inflation rate reaching 89.7 sextillion percent. Political and economic refugees started crossing the Limpopo into South Africa in unprecedented numbers. In response, South Africa introduced the Dispensation for Zimbabweans Project (DZP) to legalize the status of undocumented Zimbabweans in 2009. This later became the Zimbabwean Special Permit and later the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit. About 180,000 people are beneficiaries of this programme. This is a drop in the ocean given the one million census estimates of Zimbabweans residing in South Africa and three million unofficial estimates from other sources.

Mbeki continued to shuttle between Harare and Pretoria, hashing out a deal that eventually kept Mugabe in power despite having lost the election. This was known as the Global Political Agreement, which then paved the way for the Government of National Unity (GNU) in 2009, with Mugabe as president and Tsvangirai as prime minister. South Africa was the guarantor of the agreement. Mbeki had already been removed as president of South Africa and replaced by Kgalema Motlanthe and subsequently by Jacob Zuma. Both continued on the path of quiet diplomacy.

The GNU was a period of economic stability after the record-breaking years of hyperinflation. Zimbabweans became hopeful that things would change and they could move back to their country.

The power-sharing agreement established the Constitutional Parliamentary Select Committee, whose role was to draft and shepherd a new constitution for the country. This constitution was overwhelmingly approved by the people in a referendum held in March 2013.

While these positive developments were happening, Mugabe did not forget his primary interest – power. He continued to consolidate his control of the state apparatus. When he felt that his hand was strong enough, Mugabe called a snap election in 2013, which he won. There were allegations of widespread rigging and irregularities. The GNU collapsed and Zimbabwe fell back to its pre-GNU state.

Inflation returned. The economic hardships accelerated. They introduced a currency they called the Bond Note, which was doomed to fail from the beginning. Things came to a head on 6 November 2017, when Mugabe removed his vice-president, Mnangagwa, who then fled to South Africa. What followed was a series of events that led to a coup in Zimbabwe on 17 November, the subsequent removal of Mugabe and the return of Mnangagwa.

Zuma gave tacit approval to the coup. He even influenced the SADC Troika that was usually vocal against coups and military interventions. The troika issued a muted response after the meeting he convened in Gaborone on 16 November.

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The militarisation of Zimbabwe’s government, which had started in 1980, was completed on the watch and with the tacit approval of South Africa. The economic decline of the country continued after the coup. Repression intensified, this time with the open participation of the military. On 1 August 2018, after a disputed election, soldiers opened fire on protesters in the Harare CBD, killing six people, including Sylvia Maphosa.

Mnangagwa established a commission of enquiry led by Motlanthe to look into the killings. Everyone in Zimbabwe could see the choreographed nature of the enquiries and the blatant lies being peddled. To its credit, the commission came up with some actionable recommendations that included aligning laws and compensating the victims. All of which were mostly ignored by Mnangagwa.

Before the August 2023 elections, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula launched an attack on Nelson Chamisa, the then leader and presidential candidate for the opposition in Zimbabwe. He alleged that Chamisa was a puppet of the West and that the US wanted him in power instead of Mnangagwa. This weakened South Africa’s position as a mediator in Zimbabwe and emboldened Zanu-PF. Mnangagwa then went into an unrestrained crusade to weaken the little that remained of democracy in Zimbabwe.

He worked to disenfranchise Zimbabweans. This included unconstitutional and gerrymandered delimitation of constituencies. They ignored the constitutional requirement that constituencies could not have a voter difference of more than 20%. Instead, in urban areas, which are opposition strongholds, the average number of voters per constituency was 33,000, while in rural areas it was 22,000. The overall implication was that Zanu-PF could have more members of Parliament even with significantly fewer voters. Zanu-PF used paramilitary forces known as FAZ to intimidate voters. Opposition parties were denied the voters’ roll until the last minute. On election day, polling stations in opposition strongholds did not have ballot papers.

The SADC Electoral Observation Mission led by Nevers Mumba declared that the elections in Zimbabwe in 2023 were neither free nor fair. Mbalula openly praised Zanu-PF and defended them. He also attended Mnangagwa’s inauguration on 4 September 2023.

After the elections, Mnangagwa continued his crusade to totally annihilate the opposition. He stripped Chamisa of control of his political party, the CCC, through coordinated, state-supported and speaker-endorsed manoeuvres that gave unprecedented power to a shadow individual named Sengezo Tshabangu. This was a move to dismantle the constitution, the last pillar of resistance to his quest for a complete, unrestrained life presidency. Mnangagwa has been busy using the parliament to ram through a raft of illegal constitutional amendments popularly known as CAB3. The bill has already passed through parliament thanks to the government-controlled opposition led by Tshabangu. It now awaits Mnangagwa’s signature, even without giving people a chance at a referendum as required by the constitution.

This, if allowed to happen, would take Zimbabwe deeper into a man-made crisis that will put even more pressure on the neighbouring countries. Emissaries have been sent to South Africa, the SADC and the African Union to ask those entities to put pressure on Mnangagwa not to go through with his plans, but as of now, it doesn’t seem like he is heeding anything.

The account outlined above should give context to where the immigration crisis in South Africa originates. There were many opportunities for South Africa to use its regional muscle to reprimand and arm-twist Zanu-PF towards a path beneficial to Zimbabweans and, ultimately, South Africa, but none was taken.

We are at a point in history where the crisis in Zimbabwe has spilled into South Africa and the citizens of that country are no longer willing to bear the pain. The recent anti-immigration protests in South Africa are not xenophobia but a cry by South African citizens that they are tired of carrying the burden of sustaining Zimbabwe while the government of Zimbabwe continues to ignore the plight of its own citizens. It is a message to the ANC that its complicity is now destroying South Africa.

The ANC recently lost elections in large part because of the economic issues related to illegal immigration. Even with this dagger hanging over them, the ANC has not addressed the Zimbabwe issue with the courage it deserves. If South Africa does not pressure Mnangagwa to ditch his illegal amendments to the constitution, millions more Zimbabweans will flee the country as repression and economic crisis engulf the nation. South Africa would have to bear an even greater burden from this. Continuing on the current path is a sure way for the ANC to write its own epitaph:

Herein lies an organisation that sacrificed its own life to sustain that of a violent regime in Zimbabwe! DM