Editorial
SADC was built to guarantee democracy, peace, and shared prosperity across southern Africa. Its record in recent years suggests it has become something closer to a mutual protection society for those in power.
The Editors · Lesotho Tribune
When Zambia’s Frederick Chiluba attempted to manoeuvre around his country’s constitutional term limits in the early 2000s, his peers in the region did not look away. As Prof. Nqosa Mahao, Lesotho’s former Minister of Energy, dismissed after calling out corruption in the Matekane government, noted this week: “We learn from President Mbeki that when President Chiluba tried to amend the constitution to extend his rule his counterparts in SADC sent President Mogae to talk him out of it.” Mogae talked Chiluba out of it. Chiluba stepped down in 2002. Democratic norms held.
Prof. Mahao then asked the question that hangs over every crisis now unfolding in this region: “Perhaps the problem lies with our current breed of Regional Leaders. Do they appreciate that they bear the moral responsibility to hold each other to certain standards for the sake of good governance and the stability of our individual countries?”
Judging by the evidence of the past two years, they do not.
Former President Ian Khama of Botswana said it plainly this week: “Here we go again. Another power hungry president has the constitution amended through rigging and cash inducements to extend his term of office.” He was speaking about Zimbabwe. He could have been speaking about the region at large.
“Zimbabwe has now become the latest in a growing list of countries whose presidents want to cling to power and manipulate the constitution to achieve that.”
Seretse Khama Ian Khama, former President of Botswana
Zimbabwe’s National Assembly passed Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3 this month. The bill extends presidential and parliamentary terms from five to seven years, defers elections from 2028 to 2030, and removes the right of citizens to directly elect their president. In future, parliament will choose the head of state. In Zimbabwe’s case, that means ZANU-PF will choose the head of state. President Emmerson Mnangagwa, 83 years old and elected for a constitutionally final term in 2023, now looks set to remain in office until 2030 at the least. Analysts warn the structural changes could lock his party’s control of the presidency until 2044. Public consultations on the bill were marred by violence and intimidation. Opposition withdrew. The bill sailed through on ZANU-PF’s two-thirds parliamentary majority.
What has SADC said? Essentially nothing. What has SADC done? Essentially nothing. Mnangagwa is, at this moment, the chairperson of SADC.
Madagascar: a coup by another name
In October 2025, Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina was forced from office by a military unit, CAPSAT, after weeks of youth-led protests over service delivery failures. Rajoelina fled the country. Parliament impeached him in his absence. The Constitutional Court then installed Colonel Michael Randrianirina, the CAPSAT commander, as president. Randrianirina promised elections within 18 to 24 months.
The African Union read this for what it was: an unconstitutional change of government. It suspended Madagascar immediately. SADC chose a different path. Rather than suspension, SADC engaged. It invited Randrianirina to a virtual summit. It urged dialogue. When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa received Randrianirina in Pretoria in January 2026, the reception was warm. The message from the region was, in effect, accommodating.
The organisation that suspended Madagascar in 2009 when Rajoelina himself led a coup now welcomed back a colonel who came to power through precisely the same mechanism. Its own inconsistency made Madagascar’s instability more predictable, not less. That price is credibility, and SADC has been spending it freely.
Mozambique: silence as endorsement
Mozambique’s post-election crisis of 2024 and 2025 produced some of the most damning evidence of SADC’s institutional failure. After a deeply contested election in October 2024, in which the EU observation mission noted unjustified alterations to results, two senior opposition figures were shot dead in Maputo. Months of protests followed. Police killed protesters, including children as young as 16. By early 2025 the death toll had exceeded 300.
SADC’s observer mission declared the election orderly and professionally conducted. When the violence escalated, the regional body convened an extraordinary summit in Harare in November 2024. Tanzania led the push to ensure Mozambique would not face meaningful SADC pressure. The summit’s communique merely noted a briefing from the outgoing Mozambican president. Nothing more.
Mozambican civil society did not bother petitioning SADC when they sought external support. They went directly to South Africa. When citizens facing state violence no longer trust the regional body designed to protect them, that body has lost its core purpose.
A continent of clocks running backward
Khama listed the examples: “Cameroon (Paul Biya, 43 years in power and 93 years old), Uganda (Yoweri Museveni, 40 years in power and 81 years old), Rwanda (Paul Kagame, 26 years in power and counting and 68 years old).” The list of those who will not leave is longer than the list of those who do.
He identified what connects them: “Political assassinations, fabricated charges and detentions, kidnappings and disappearances as recently in Tanzania and Uganda are the modus operandi of these and other such tyrants.” These are not accidents of governance. They are its methods.
On Zimbabwe’s specific history, Khama did not spare the language: “Zimbabwe and its long suffering people have been subjected to the same from the days of Gukurahundi to present day.” And he drew a conclusion that should settle any argument about whether this constitutes continuity or change: “The only thing that has changed since Rhodesia and Ian Smith, is the name of his country and that of its leaders. Oppressors come in all colours.”
What Mnangagwa is doing to Zimbabwe’s constitution is different in method but not in spirit. The bill’s architects in ZANU-PF had the audacity to justify it by saying elections are toxic. The logical end of that argument is no elections at all. The 2013 constitution was drafted with the specific intention of preventing the accumulation of power that Robert Mugabe personified over four decades. CAB3 systematically dismantles those protections. Mnangagwa, who styled himself the father of a Second Republic distinct from Mugabe’s excesses, now leads the effort to reverse the constitutional order built to prevent a return to exactly that.
“The only thing that has changed since Rhodesia and Ian Smith, is the name of his country and that of its leaders. Oppressors come in all colours.”
Seretse Khama Ian Khama, former President of Botswana
What accountability requires
SADC’s founding documents are not ambiguous. The Treaty of 1992 commits member states to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. The SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections require members to prevent political violence. The Windhoek Treaty provision against unconstitutional changes of government exists precisely for moments like these. These are not aspirational clauses. They are binding obligations that member states signed.
The problem is that SADC has no spine for enforcement when the violator is a sitting head of state, and particularly not when that head of state chairs the organisation. The AU at least suspended Madagascar. SADC watched. The AU expressed concern about Zimbabwe. SADC is run by the man whose constitution is being bent. The structural conflict of interest is complete.
What is required is not a summit communique that notes a briefing. What is required is the clarity that Prof. Mahao’s question demands. When a member state amends its constitution to abolish direct presidential elections, that is not a domestic administrative matter. It is a fundamental alteration of the democratic contract between citizens and the state, and it falls squarely within SADC’s stated mandate. When a member state kills hundreds of protesters after a disputed election, that is not an internal security matter. It is a regional crisis, because instability in Mozambique paralyses the ports on which half of southern Africa’s trade depends.
SADC leaders must either enforce the norms they agreed to or stop claiming to represent those norms. The current position, in which the body holds summits, issues communiques, deploys panels of elders, and changes nothing, is worse than silence. It is performance in the service of impunity.
The people of Zimbabwe deserve to directly elect their president. The people of Mozambique deserved an honest count of their votes. The people of Madagascar deserved a civilian government and a credible transition, not a colonel installed by constitutional fiction. In each case, SADC had the mandate, the platform, and the precedent to say so clearly. In each case, it chose otherwise.
Festus Mogae went to Lusaka. He talked. Chiluba listened. That is the standard this region set for itself, and it is the standard the current generation of leaders has abandoned. The question Prof. Mahao posed is the right one. Whether anyone in the region has the political courage to answer it honestly remains, for now, unanswered.
