A Call for African Leadership

The 15-nation Southern African Development Community met this past week in Johannesburg, South Africa to discuss two pressing issues: (1.) potential power sharing agreement in Zimbabwe; and (2.) the possibility of sending peacekeeping forces into the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In Zimbabwe, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai (MDC-T) won a plurality in the first round of elections against President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). However, the 84-year-old Mugabe, who has ruled as chief executive of Zimbabwe since one year after the birth of the Zimbabwe nation from the ashes of white-minority ruled Rhodesia in 1980, refused to give up power. In September 2008, a tentative power-sharing deal was reached where Tsvangirai would become Prime Minister and Mugabe would retain the role of President. However, the exact details are being disputed.

The situation in The Congo is much more dire. The current conflict that has its roots in the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis by Hutu militias. After the Hutu militias were kicked out of Rwanda, they dispersed to hinterlands of the eastern Congo province of North Kivu. Unlike Rwanda, which is very small geographically, the Congo is a very large country, and North Kivu (which includes the cities of Bukavu and Goma), on the eastern border with with Rwanda, is very far removed from the capital of the Kinshassa in the west. Both governments are culpable on the current situation, which have privately encouraged Tutsi and Hutu militias, respectively, in North Kivu.

The situation is so out of control that the 17,000 U.N. peacekeepers are basically deemed useless. Not only must the governments of the Congo and Rwanda step up to legitimize the rebels into the political process, but there must be more leadership within Africa, particularly South Africa. It’s time that Africa play a larger role in policing itself. Hopefully ‘interim’ president Kgalema Motlanthe and president-in-waiting Jacob Zuma will succeed where former President Thabo Mbeki failed in providing leadership within Africa. For all its problems, South Africa is a beacon of hope for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and must take more responsibility for the affairs of the continent.

A Lesson From Canada

An Economist.com article entitled The Conservatives by a bigger head notes that a fragmented Canada gave Stephen Harper another term as Conservative Prime Minister when his party won the October 2008 federal election, achieving a bit more strength in a minority government. While the Conservatives increased their share of the popular vote by little more than a percentage point to 37.6%, this will likely only be translated into about 19 more seats.

Harper and the Conservatives did solidify their western base of Alberta oilmen and Saskatchewan farmers, and picked up seats in suburban Ontario and the Maritime provinces. However, Harper failed to increase his party’s ten seats in Quebec. For the most part in Quebec, the separatist Bloc Québécois blocked any Conservative advance, even though independence never surfaced as an issue during the campaign.

However, more than the Conservatives failing to get a majority, the main lesson to come out of the Canadian election is that Liberals were the ones that really lost it. Their share of the popular vote fell to 26%, their lowest since 1867. The Liberal leader, Stéphane Dion, a Quebecker, chose to fight the election on a bold plan for a carbon tax just when voters began to worry about the economy. (It didn’t help that Dion is not a good communicator in English.)

A broader lesson from the Canadian election is that a candidate should not impose a tax on all citizens, particularly on the middle class, when the economy is slowing. This is a lesson the McCain campaign has ignored with its proposed tax on employees for the value of employer-paid health care benefits. This tax has been one of Obama’s most effective campaign attacks and the focus of his prime literature drops over the past few weeks.