SADC’s policymaking and power relations

After the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa joined the SADCC’s successor, the SADC, formed in 1992. This new development also entailed the SADC redefining its policies and role to correspond with a post-apartheid world. The end of the apartheid era also marked the end of minority governments across Southern Africa. The coming on board of South Africa, previously the region’s giant enemy, was not without challenges. Adedeji (1996: 9) highlights that the damage caused by South Africa’s apartheid regime during the war of destabilisation remained fresh in the minds of Southern African leaders. He notes that levels of distrust, even toward South Africa’s new black majority government headed by Nelson Mandela, were high (Adedeji, 1996: 9). This distrust manifested itself in various forms, and brought to the fore the significant role of strong personalities in shaping what was to be adopted as collective SADC policy to address regional security.

South Africa’s push to re-conceptualise SADC’s notion of security in line with a neo-liberal paradigm resulted in serious differences between two strong heads of state: Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela (CCR, 2013: 36). Mugabe held a reactionary position, pushing for a narrow and patriarchal kind of security with a view that the ISDSC is maintained as a separate military security wing with its own summit, while Mandela pushed for a broader notion of peace that included a non-military security dimension. The latter approach pushed for the ISDSC security organ to be integrated into the new SADC policy framework and report to the summit of heads of state (CCR, 2013: 36). Mandela’s South Africa was perceived as a “norm entrepreneur” and its external policy anchored on pushing a liberal-human rights agenda in Southern Africa and the Great Lakes region (Louw-Vaudran, 2016: 1-4). The tension between a state militaristic-centred approach to security and one centred on social welfare continued with emphasis being put on one or the other policy instrument. Given these tensions, it took close to five years to put in place the SADC’s new security policy framework. For example, while the decision to establish the SADC Organ on Politics, Defense, and Security (OPDSC) happened in 1996, it only came into force in 2001.

In line with a neo-liberal focus, South Africa played a leading role in pushing for the inclusion of new security issues, and the broadening of the notion of security beyond a military-centred definition. South Africa, for example, pushed for the establishment of the OPDSC, which was to replace the ISDSC at an

SADC—Non-state actors and region building 217 extraordinary summit in Botswana on June 28, 1996. According to Khadiagala (2001: 141), the OPDSC was to function as the security arm of SADC, concerned with regional security, political cooperation such as democracy and human rights, conflict prevention and resolution, peacekeeping and collective security and defence. Under the auspices of the OPDSC, South Africa and Botswana conducted a poorly organised military mission to a politically embattled Lesotho in 1998 until 1999 that exposed the SADC’s failure to institutionalise the very policies it had developed.

Not only were collective SADC policies towards the region at the level of the OPDSC not effected as planned, the SADC’s security architecture was highly personalised by the domination of Mugabe and his country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For instance, Mugabe rammed through and rationalised SADC’s intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in August 1998. In this, Angola’s and Zimbabwe’s involvement in the DRC were largely perceived as driven by far narrower national and personalised interests. Mugabe, argues Khadiagala, used the “SADC Organ as a unilateral instrument for his own aggressive foreign policy” (2001: 145). Between 1975 and the 1990s, Zimbabwe also played a key military role in securing the Limpopo corridor linking South Africa, Swaziland, DRC, Zambia and Zimbabwe to Maputo in Mozambique (Khadiagala, 2012: 25-38; Mbuende, 2012: 39-60). Narrow personal interests preoccupied most newly independent states, driven by its elite leadership point to what has become the legacy of national liberation struggle in addressing regional insecurities across Southern Africa.

The SADC’s collective policies on regional security expanded over time to include the Mutual Defence Pact of 2003, the Strategic Indicative Plan for the Organ (SIPO) of 2004, and its revised version of 2012. The OPDSC as outlined in the SIPO highlights an expanded regional policy in the political, defence, public security sector and state security spheres (Revised edition SIPO, 2010). The security threats addressed within the SIPO policy framework included human trafficking, organised crime, illegal migration, maritime piracy, economic threats, foreign interference, HIV/AIDS and the smuggling of goods. Further, within the evolved SIPO of 2012, regional security focus areas include “providing and ensuring services in law enforcement, public safety, corrections/prisons, immigration, parks and wildlife, customs and refugees” (Revised edition SIPO, 2010). The SIPO document equally accommodates for non-state participation within SADC’s broader policymaking framework in order to ensure their contribution to community building, and to addressing issues around security and governance (CCR, 2013: 37). Importantly, the SIPO further calls for collaboration with non-state actors in areas of research, public debates, seminars, as well as in conflict prevention, management and resolution (Revised edition SIPO, 2010).

This emergent regionalism recognises mixed approaches that includes the participation of non-state actors within the SADC’s inter-governmental structures to promote greater security and development. Equally, the SADC Treaty of 1992 made progress to acknowledge and recognise the role of non-state actors in collective region building. The SADC’s policy approaches to region-buildinghave in this way differed from those of the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) and Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), due to the different contexts in which the latter organisations emerged. SACU and COMESA have evolved as economic regional bodies, while the SADC began as a politically oriented, inter-governmental organisation, which, only over time, came to include economic and social functions. Since the 1990s, African agency reflects in the growing recognition of non-state actors as key partners in intergovernmental policy documents, as well as in state and non-state combined policymaking efforts to address regional security.