EDITORIAL | Sadc’s response to Mozambique’s post-election upheaval is predictably inept

The aftermath of the recent Mozambique election has exposed yet again how ineffective the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) can be.

On October 24, Mozambique declared liberation movement Frelimo the winner of the elections with an overwhelming 71% of the vote. This meant that its president, Daniel Chapo, would take over from Filipe Nyusi. Despite allegations of violence, vote rigging and threats against the opposition, Sadc leaders, including the ANC, congratulated Chapo and looked forward to working with the newly installed government.

Days later, the country was burning. This is partly due to the opposition party — the Optimist Party for the Development of Mozambique (Podemos) — rejecting the result. Recently, the violent protests in Mozambique have moved to the borders of South Africa. On Thursday, the South African Border Management Authority closed the Lebombo border connecting both countries.

Who must bear the burden of the instability? Is South Africa the region's brother's keeper? What is the South African government doing to safeguard its interests and sovereign integrity and safety of its people?

The ANC, the South African government and their neighbours have been mum about the rising tensions.

In his statement, Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa said ZANU-PF stands ready to “cement the long-existing revolutionary unity between our two parties and our two countries.” This was not surprising given the allegations against his election.

President Cyril Ramaphosa, however, took a more measured approach and congratulated Chapo based on the preliminary results.

He commended the people of Mozambique for their active and enthusiastic participation in the elections, especially women, who constituted 53% of the voters, and applauded its electoral commission for the professional way they conducted the elections.

However, it remains odd that Sadc does not seem to take its role in the region seriously. Who must bear the burden of the instability? Is South Africa the region's brother's keeper? What is the South African government doing to safeguard its interests and sovereign integrity and safety of its people?

“The president notes that these elections are historic since they were held 32 years following the signing of the General Peace Agreement , which brought an end to the civil war and introduced multiparty democracy in Mozambique.”

Ramaphosa has expressed concern about the ongoing post-election violence and the deaths of Elvino Dias and Paulo Guambe and others. He called for Mozambique's law enforcement agencies to speedily investigate these incidents and bring the perpetrators to justice.

Mozambique is teetering at the brink of anarchy, its government has threatened to deploy soldiers against its people, yet Sadc has no informed authority on whether the elections were indeed free and fair.

Until recently Sadc had said little about the crisis facing the people of Mozambique. This week, it was reported that Sadc had called leaders to an urgent meeting to discuss the Mozambican crisis. Sadc director of security affairs Prof Kula Ishmael Theletsane said the meeting had long been scheduled and Mozambique would simply be added to its agenda. This is another indicator of Sadc’s limp authority in the region and how inept it is to handle conflict.

Theletsane added in a Newzroom Afrika interview on Thursday that while the body had observed that internal systems were not holding, they would likely send a team of elders (former heads of state) to engage the different stakeholders to find a solution. He said the preliminary report spoke about the peaceful nature of the elections.

In contrast, the EU Election Observation Mission has released a preliminary report speaking to the tainted credibility of the electoral process.

“There was a notable lack of confidence in the reliability of the electoral register, given the discrepancies between the population projections of the INE [National Statistics Institute] and the electoral register: in several provinces, the voter register reflected a higher number of voters than the overall voting age population derived from the national census. The EU EOM shares these concerns, already raised by the EU mission deployed to the 2019 election,” it said.

A total of 17,169,239 citizens were registered, including 333,839 in the diaspora, representing an increase of 30% from the 2019 elections, in a context where projection by the National Statistics Institute indicated an adult population growth of 17%.

Part of Sadc’s challenge lies in its lack of resources and its reliance on diplomacy. The body has very little capacity to deploy observers in elections and often turns to soft diplomacy, as it has done in Zimbabwe, to settle the political conflict. This strategy has often not yielded the intended result and is unlikely to see an end to the conflict.

The Mozambique problem might seem distant, but history has taught South Africans that when our neighbours are in turmoil, it likely becomes our burden to bear.