The 44th Ordinary Summit of SADC Heads of State and Government was held in Harare, Zimbabwe on August 17, 2024 where Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa assumed its leadership. Claims abound that the SADC is simply an old boys’ club where solidarity and propping each other’s regimes trump holding each other accountable, says the writer. Picture: SADC
Dr. Sizo Nkala
WHILE elections should ordinarily serve as a renewal and revitalisation of democracy, Mozambique’s elections turned out to be a scandalisation of democracy.
The country just concluded a grim election season with 300 people reportedly losing their lives and hundreds more injured in post-election violence triggered by the heavily disputed outcome of the October 9 elections.
While the ruling party, the Front for Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) was declared the winner of the presidential, legislative, and provincial elections by both the National Electoral Commission (NEC) and the Constitutional Council which is the country’s apex court, the opposition parties, led by independent presidential candidate Venancio Mondlane, were adamant that there was widespread rigging in favour of Frelimo. Mondlane, who emerged as the runner-up in the presidential elections with 24 per cent of the vote, claimed that he had been robbed of his victory and immediately called on his supporters to protest and reject the results announced by the NEC.
The security forces’ heavy-handed response to the ensuing demonstrations resulted in the deaths of 300 people including the eight who were reportedly killed on the day of Frelimo’s Daniel Chapo’s presidential inauguration on January 15.
The violence in Mozambique threatened to turn into a regional crisis by forcing the temporary closure of the Lebombo border post between Mozambique and South Africa thus disrupting critical regional supply chains.
As much as the chaos that unfolded in the post-election scenes in Mozambique is a reflection of the country’s weak institutions, it is also an indictment of the regional body, the Southern African Development Community (SADC)’s failure to prevent and manage such situations.
Even armed with structures such as the SADC Electoral Advisory Council (SEAC) and the SADC Election Observation Mission (SEOM), and the SADC Guidelines and Principles Governing Democratic Elections, the regional body’s handling of the electoral crisis in Mozambique and other member states has left a lot to be desired.
The SADC Treaty of 1992 itself enjoins the organization to promote “common economic, political, social values and systems…enhance democracy and good governance.”
While these structures were created to entrench democratic values and reinforce the norm of free and fair elections, they have largely been ignored or used to rubber-stamp questionable elections that do not meet even the minimum standards of a democratic election.
Both the SEAC and the SEOM failed to pick up any concerns or signs that could have predicted the explosive post-election violence in Mozambique. The SEOM even issued a preliminary report soon after the October 9 elections which gave Mozambique’s electoral process a clean bill of health. The report concluded that the “elections were professionally organized, conducted in an orderly, peaceful, and free atmosphere”.
One wonders whether, with only 53 observers visiting only 288 out of over 28,000 polling stations, the SEOM was in a position to make any conclusive observations on the Mozambican elections.
If the SEOM is going to be the eyes and ears of the SADC it needs to be adequately capacitated to fulfil such a mandate. In the past where SEOM has been critical of election processes in a member state like the Zimbabwean harmonized elections in 2023, its report was strenuously protested by the Zimbabwean government and was largely ignored by the SADC.
What was even more baffling in SADC’s reaction to the elections in Mozambique was the premature congratulatory message that the sitting SADC Chairperson, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa issued to Frelimo for its victory in the elections even before Mozambique’s NEC had announced the results.
These were very reckless remarks from a SADC Chairperson which undermined any credibility that the organization may have had in resolving the post-election conflict in Mozambique as he had already chosen sides.
When President Mnangagwa called for an Extraordinary SADC Summit in November 2023, his government played down the Mozambican issue claiming that the Summit was convened to discuss SADC’s Mission in the DRC while treating the post-election conflict in Mozambique as a secondary item on the agenda.
Even then, Mozambique’s then-President Felipe Nyusi was the only party invited to the gathering to update the organization on the situation in his country. President Nyusi, an obviously conflicted party, predictably said the situation was under control insisting that his government was seized with it. This is despite widespread media reports awash with scenes of violence in different parts of the country.
None of Mozambique’s opposition parties or civil society organizations were invited to the Summit to share their side of the story. This lent credence to the claims that the SADC is simply an old boys’ club where solidarity and propping each other’s regimes trump holding each other accountable.
* Dr. Sizo Nkala is a Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Africa-China Studies.
** The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of The African.