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Joram Nyathi Spectrum

With the whiteman in charge of the law, embarrassments like the one at Sandton always hang like the sword of Damocles over Zuma and the ANC.

TWO lessons emerged from the disgusting events at Sandton, South Africa, last weekend where some racist agency tried to get a sitting African head of state arrested for alleged crimes against humanity, genocide or human rights violations.

The first lesson concerns the risks African leaders invariably expose themselves and their countries to by blindly signing documents they don’t understand, thus binding their nations to conventions whose objectives and motives look noble until you sign.

This is despite African countries spending millions of dollars to train lawyers whose love for money easily puts them at the service of foreign interests.

The second is that quicksands lie in Africa’s way as the continent pushes to break away from the bondage of imperialist domination and strives for closer integration.

It is a continent too rich to be weaned off despite bloody wars to end colonial rule, and former colonial powers reap far more from Africa’s supposed tutelage.

Events at the AU summit at the weekend at which the Southern Africa Litigation Centre applied for and Judge Hans Fabricius granted an interim order for Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir not to leave South Africa were a salutary warning, and this time around President Zuma’s nous saved the AU, Africa, from a moral and diplomatic catastrophe.

But they also left Zuma and the ANC badly exposed to an embittered white world.

There is no need to list the conventions or resolutions to which African governments have signed up to without ever participating in their drafting.

The most recent, the most despicable targeting an African country, was UNSC resolution 1973 of March 17 2011.

Zuma’s hand in that resolution still drips with the blood of Muammar Gaddafi.

That cannot be atoned for by his courageous decision at the weekend to let President Al-Bashir leave South Africa before a court order for his arrest and handover to The Hague, could be issued.

The SALC was granted its wish when President Al-Bashir was safely out of harm’s way in Sudan.

They can follow him in Khartoum.

The embarrassing incident in Johannesburg was itself a consequence of another signature to the Rome Statute setting up the ICC, to which South Africa and a number of other African leaders bound themselves and their nations, naively believing, even this late in the day, that this is a fair world and that they had influence over how global systems are administered.

The International Criminal Court is 60 percent funded by the EU.

That tells us who calls the tune to which music and what causes!

The third signature was Nelson Mandela’s.

South Africa is probably the only country whose independence constitution has the peculiar distinction of perpetually excluding the black majority from mainstream economic activity even as it talks about racial equality, where the whiteman remains firmly in charge of the law and, consequently, is the sole watchdog over all government operations. No wonder the white world worships Mandela for this legacy.

It had been hoped that the ANC, enjoying a two-thirds majority in Parliament, would work fast to cure this disease by attending to the many defects in the constitution.

Instead, it looks like it is the whiteman’s DA in ascendancy while Julius Malema distracts and is distracted by shimmer of Nkandla.

With the whiteman in charge of the law, embarrassments like the one at Sandton always hang like the sword of Damocles over Zuma and the ANC.

What is disturbing is how local and South African black ape-man have been “hanging their heads in shame” about how President Zuma had ignored a court order and how this weakened the principle of separation of powers.

They will never deploy their legal minds to defend the just demand by Africa for permanent seats in the UN Security Council and a veto power so the continent can a genuine influence on global events and veto some blatantly racist decisions. No, that is a sacred sphere where only Europeans and the United States have a God-given right to govern unperturbed by African natives.

President Zuma knew when he let Bashir go the attacks would follow. But he faced a veritable dilemma: whether it was more important for him to listen to an importune racist agency seeking global notoriety by getting a sitting African head of state to The Hague from South African soil or to forestall the staggering consequences thereof by letting Bashir go.

In supporting the greater cause of Africa, Zuma, wittingly or otherwise, sacrificed his political career and legacy at home. We can almost be certain the SALC knew President Zuma would not arrest Al-Bashir.

Thus the court action was trained at the heart of Zuma and the ANC, to discredit both at home and abroad as an institution which violates the rule of law at home and disregards international statutes and covenants to which it is a voluntary signatory.

That should render both unelectable.

Malema is playing into the hands of this lobby by being too preoccupied with Nkandla.

Unfortunately, he can only help weaken the ANC, but the EFF can’t be an alternative government without the ANC’s support base.

Without being tempered by the ANC’s sober, if sadly centrist approach, the Malema brand alone tends to donate voters to the Democratic Alliance.

That’s a sure way to alienate South Africa from a continent now almost solidly determined to defy Europe and America. After President Mugabe’s simultaneous chairmanship of Sadc and the AU, it will be difficult to think in supine, old ways again regarding Africa’s destiny, not even if Khama chooses to pull Botswana out of both.

The bid to get President Bashir arrested, if it had succeeded, would have been a triumph for coloniality forces which always defer to Europe and America and hold all African institutions and their leaders in contempt while championing America’s selective democracy and rule of law.

If that evil scheme of constitutional perfidy had succeeded, it would have eviscerated the African Union of all moral authority to talk of the ideals of a united and independent Africa as envisaged by heroes such as Nyerere.

Beyond embarrassing African leaders at the Sandton Convention Centre, this daring, insolent attack, if allowed to succeed in the name of rule of law, would have set a catastrophic precedent.

Its effect was to say the Rome Statute and its Eurocentric ICC were greater than the African Union and that any African leader could be picked up and arrested at the whim of some foreign-sponsored political institution. They are used to that.

They did it with Uhuru Kenyatta.

What greater good could possibly be served by President Zuma respecting such a divisive, dishonourable law?

The intention of that insulting gesture by SALC was, beyond Zuma and the ANC, to break up the African Union, to wreck everything President Mugabe is fighting for — a united Africa able to stand up to America and defend its resources, an Africa not dependent on Europe to resolve disputes or to fund operational programmes.

We can judge for ourselves whether a break-up of the African Union is in the interest of ordinary people or serves the agenda of ape-men fronting foreign agendas — to see Africa weakened and permanently divided?

Not only would Bashir feel betrayed by Zuma because of the initial guarantee of immunity, but that the AU, whose summit he was attending, could never again be trusted to protect its leadership.

Sudan would feel the insult and the treachery.

All to honour a law whose entire purpose and framing is to demean Africans and their institutions!

To keep African nations under a European leash in the name of democracy and human rights which they violate with impunity.

The embarrassing incident in South Africa remains salutary to the extent that Africans realise they have a shared destiny, that they need economic independence, and that this cannot be achieved through dependency and foreign aid.

There is a greater imperative now than ever before for faster industrialisation and beneficiation of natural resources before exports.

It is more important now more than ever for Africa to rise and stand on its feet and refuse to be divided.

That incident was meant to divert African leaders’ attention from Agenda 2063 and start fighting each other over President Bashir.

One can only hope that African countries which are signatories to the Rome Statute are thinking hard about its ultimate purpose versus African unity and development.

Pulling out of this sinister project can only represent enlightened self-interest.

The sooner, the better.

The Sandton incident is not the last. It is one of many quicksands along the way which Africa will have to navigate in search of true being.