As Cyril Ramaphosa focuses his foreign policy almost exclusively on Israel and Gaza, he is ignoring serious abuses of rights and mass killings in Africa.
Much closer to home, Tanzanian opposition leader Tundu Lissu languishes in jail on ‘treason’ charges, the trial due to formally commence on 6 October, just weeks before the East African republic’s ‘election’ from which his party, Chadema, has been banned. Next door in Uganda, Dr Kizza Besigye has been imprisoned on similar charges for nearly a year. His crime was to stand up to his former boss, Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled the country since seizing power in 1986. Uganda’s elections are scheduled for next January. In the words of Uganda’s opposition leader, Bobi Wine, “brutality loads” and the costs are greater than human rights alone.
One of the great costs still to be felt from the Trump administration is in terms of the shift in attention from improving democracy as a foundation of better governance to making deals.
The July State Department decision to no longer comment on foreign elections is the most recent step away from promoting democratic values abroad. In an official cable, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that public comments on foreign elections “should be brief, focused on congratulating the winning candidate and, when appropriate, noting shared foreign policy interests”.
Such messages, the memo added, “should avoid opining on the fairness or integrity of an electoral process, its legitimacy, or the democratic values of the country in question”.
President Donald Trump’s style and the emblematic, if temporary, role of Elon Musk have given oxygen to those business leaders who publicly preach about the primacy of individual rights and making the world a better place so long as the economy (money) is put before politics (democracy and human rights).
It’s too easy and sometimes plain convenient to turn a blind eye to injustice. It may even be handsomely remunerative, as tempted some during apartheid, a history which many have attempted to sidestep.
The standard defence of the apartheid generation was that it would have been worse without business investment, not that a system of investment drove the migrant labour practices that dehumanised and de-socialised workers over multiple generations.
Political economy
And yet, we know empirically that the prospect for African reform and its economic counterpart of prosperity is all about politics and the relationship between politics and economic choices, otherwise known as political economy. Trump’s USAID cuts and the general US foreign policy retreat are a crisp lesson in that.
This explains, too, the empirical correlation between democracy and development across Africa, whatever the case elsewhere. For instance, those sub-Saharan African states classified by Freedom House as having ‘free’ political systems – Botswana, Cabo Verde, Ghana, Lesotho, Mauritius, Namibia, Sao Tome and Principe, Seychelles, and South Africa (9) – enjoyed in 2024 an average per capita income of $5,988, three times more than those deemed ‘partly free’ (21) or ‘unfree’ (26).
The costs of this approach are hardly academic. In Uganda, opposition leader Dr Kizza Besigye has been held in custody since November last year at a military base for allegedly plotting a coup. He was illegally renditioned from neighbouring Kenya. Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power for four decades, is planning re-election in January.
If previous events and Besigye’s detention are any measure, the going for the opposition led by Bobi Wine is likely to be tough. Besigye stood against Museveni in four elections. Meanwhile, Museveni’s son and likely successor, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, openly talks on social media about wanting to beat, hang, torture and kill opponents of the autocratic regime.
Wine has documented this well in his article, ‘Meet Uganda’s next president, a madman who tweets about killing opposition leaders’.
Museveni’s eldest son is Chief of the Ugandan Defence Force. In February, General Kainerugaba posted that Besigye would leave prison either “in his coffin after we hang him or shoot him or on his knees apologising to Mzee”, referring to Museveni.
“I would cut off his head …”
A month earlier, he had posted about Wine (the stage name of Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, the leader of the National Unity Platform) saying: “If Mzee was not there, I would cut off his head today.”
As Wine has written in reponse, “The looming Muhoozi presidency could set Uganda back and remove the last pretences of democracy as violent suppression of the opposition rises. The economic effects of this sort of violent anti-democratic presidency, as illustrated by Venezuela, will be severe.”
Investors and their shareholders should be among those voices urging caution and encouraging reform, just as was expected from them under apartheid. Based on past performance, and choice, it’s unlikely however that the conscience of human rights will trump the lure of profit, no matter the grubby circumstances.
The same excuses are true for Tanzania, where there is money to be made if you hold your nose to the stench of political power.
The leader of the opposition, Tundu Lissu, was arrested on 9 April also on treason charges, and looks set to remain there until the election has safely passed. Senior members of the Chadema opposition party are either in prison or are continually harassed.
There is a longstanding pattern here, even though donors have long regarded Tanzania as a darling. A former head of the bar association, Lissu has built a reputation as a fierce critic of government, especially that of President John Magufuli, whose administration he accused of the systematic looting of public funds.
Elected as MP in 2010, Lissu was arrested six times in 2017, accused of insulting the president and disturbing public order, among other charges. Then, on 7 September that year, he was shot 16 times in the parking lot of his parliamentary residence. After many months in hospital and some 19 operations later, he returned to Tanzania in January 2023. No one was convicted for the attempt on his life.
Remained largely silent
The international community has remained largely silent on these actions. Others learn from the precedent of international inaction.
In Mozambique, following disputed elections last October, presidential contender Veny Mondlane is now also up on various charges, including inciting violence, despite having previously concluded a peace compact with the government. The plan there seems to be to tie him up, like Besigye and Lissu, in a form of lawfare, exhausting the opposition’s will (and finances) to resist.
Again, in these cases the investor community is schtum. And the diplomatic community has failed also to find its voice. Given that SADC operates as little more than an old boys club, one does not expect better.
But it’s more than extraordinary, however, for the Commonwealth and UN in particular to remain silent. It’s scandalous.
Commonwealth countries are committed to promoting human rights as a core value, as enshrined in the Harare Declaration and the Commonwealth Charter. Both the Preamble to the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set out clearly the rights, responsibilities and protections of the individual.
What is the point, one has to ask, of having the Commonwealth or United Nations when they are incapable not only of protecting individual rights, but of putting people first in international relations? Why is it that human rights in Gaza (which are important) should obscure the fight for the same rights in Africa, especially when the scale of bloodshed in conflicts in the Horn of Africa far outstrips that of other contemporary conflagrations?
Where politics matters, it’s not ostensibly in the interests of citizens but rather the agenda of leaders. This helps to explain why Gaza and not Sudan or the DRC is at the top of President Ramaphosa’s agenda at the United Nations this week.
This role inevitably falls to civil society and those political leaders elsewhere on the continent who see the danger of this precedent.
Unless the lines on human rights, sovereign protections and the ability to choose freely are drawn everywhere, they are drawn nowhere. And if Africans want others to be concerned about their plight, they need equally to be concerned about the human condition elsewhere, in Ukraine, in China, among the Tibetans and Uighurs, and in Afghanistan.
Enlightened self-interest
This is based less on sentimentality than enlightened self-interest. For it’s a wise investment in the future to watch out for others, especially in a world shaped by a short-term return on ego and a pitiful monochromatic metric of money.
And for those one-eyed businesses which put profits before people, in the end, they will not be remembered by the money accumulated but the manner in which it was made and the difference they made with it.
For Ramaphosa and others, these may be inconvenient truths. But without equal attention to all injustice, from Ukraine to Uganda, the government’s focus on Israel and Gaza rings hollow.
[Image: Road Ahead on Unsplash]
The views of the writers are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend