JUSTICE MALALA | Why would free people champion Mugabe or Putin?

On Friday the world will mark a year since Russia’s immoral and brutal invasion of Ukraine. The invasion, which Russia had boasted would be completed within days or at most weeks, looks set to continue for years to come, with millions displaced and dead, and dire consequences for food security in some parts of our continent.

If you go on South African social media, you will be amazed by the number of people who use their accounts on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms to broadcast their love and admiration for Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, or Zimbabwe’s late leader Robert Mugabe. It continues to be a mystery to some of us why, in this free republic, anyone would support men who rule, malevolently, by decree. It is a mystery why those who enjoy all the freedoms — of association, of expression, of movement — that we South Africans lustily enjoy, would applaud people who deny their own citizens these same freedoms we take for granted.

This is not to say these South Africans who applaud Mugabe and Putin are acting without official encouragement. Our government has over the past 20 years been one of the most fervent supporters of both Putin and Mugabe across the globe. This country, both officially and unofficially, seems to love men who are driving their own people to flee their homes. Why?

The Washington Post reported this week that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “has set off a historic exodus of his own people”. It said initial data shows that “at least 500,000, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left in the year since the invasion began — a tidal wave on scale with emigration after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991”.

Thankfully, South Africa is nothing like Russia or Zimbabwe. South Africa has its many problems, but it’s not a dictatorship.

We don’t have any clear numbers for how many Zimbabweans have fled their country since Mugabe brought it to its knees in the early 2000s, but we know they are in the millions. Estimates have put the number between four and seven million people.

Now, these Zimbabweans are fleeing their own homes, neighbours, communities, villages, and townships to come and live in squalor and danger in a foreign country. They flee their country because if they support opposition parties they are jailed, beaten or tortured. They flee because the economy has been run into the ground and they have no jobs and no means of earning a living.

So, these fervent supporters of Putin in SA want for themselves what Russians — or Zimbabweans — do not have. There is no free press in Russia or Zimbabwe. Those who report on the government’s misdeeds or criticise the powers that be are threatened, detained, tortured, jailed or disappeared.

Activists and opposition party members are jailed and sentenced to long prison terms on spurious grounds.

These are freedoms that are enjoyed in South Africa by these same cheerleaders of Putin and the Zimbabwean regime. One must ask: what would they do if they were in the same position in their own country? Do they want the same for themselves? When I listen to these supporters of Russia and Zimbabwe — particularly EFF — I am always struck by just how strongly-worded their criticisms of President Cyril Ramaphosa are. It strikes me that if they were to say the same things in Russia or in Zimbabwe, they would either be jailed or mysteriously thrown off tall buildings to their deaths.

Thankfully, South Africa is nothing like Russia or Zimbabwe. South Africa has its many problems, but it’s not a dictatorship. Many would make an argument — correctly so — that we have built one of the most free and open democracies in the world right here, and they would not be wrong. It’s something to be proud of.

Oligarchs thrive in Russia, as they do in Zimbabwe. Without connections one has no chance of progressing in life. Unless one is a friend of, relative of, or mistress of, a government minister, then one is going nowhere. That is thankfully still not the case in SA.

That, however, does not mean that we should not be careful about these supporters of dictators that we find in South Africa. What they want is to turn South Africa into an illiberal state where freedoms are suppressed, where the connected thrive, where the opposition is jailed or exiled, and where power is concentrated among a small, ruthless, corrupt, elite.

They admire the Mugabes and Putins of this world because they want to turn us into the sort of state where — like Zimbabwe and Russia — democracy exists in name only. As we reflect on one year of Russia’s murderous and brutal invasion of Ukraine, we should also remember that many among us want this country to become an oligarchic failed state that bullies its way across the continent. We must not let it happen.