Southern Africa’s regional grouping body SADC have decided to send a delegation of three leaders to donor countries to ask the donors to drop sanctions on Zimbabwe. The three leaders are South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, Namibia’s Hifikepunye Pohamba, Rupiah Banda of Zambia. The delegation’s argument is that “lifting [the] sanctions would give a chance to the efforts we [the SADC region] are making there and empower Sadc to do more on Zimbabwe.”
It would appear that the elephant in the room is now awake. SADC can no longer look the other way pretending not see; it has realiased that the problems in Zimbabwe are not Zimbabwe’s alone; they are regional. Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown has turned out to be an immigration problem in South Africa and a loss of trading partner for the lest of the region.
But why has it taken SADC this long to wake up to the reality? Nothing is impossible, so they say. But how can the SADC delegation realistically convince the donor countries on Zimbabwe’s human rights situation when the SADC countries did not formerly recognise it? Is this not double standard?