Editor,Please allow me to respond to Felly Kimenyi’s article, “Should it be France to intervene in the CAR?”, published in The New Times on November 28.President Zuma steamrollered his candidate, Mrs. Zuma, over strong opposition to head the African Union Commission because, he claimed, the previous Commission President, Jean Ping, had been ineffectual in resisting Western diktats over African views – most especially in Côte d’Ivoire and Libya – and making sure African solutions took precedence.Instead, we have seen what subsequently happened, when Pretoria teamed up with Dar es Salaam to act as the cats’ paw to French and Western preferred outcomes in the DRC that sabotaged the local ICGLR process for a negotiated end to the M23 rebellion.We now have a very studious silence from Addis Ababa and Pretoria (perhaps understandable given the SANDF’s recent experience in the Central African Republic). But it still begs the question, what was all that abrasive effort to replace a Jean Ping, accused of ineffectiveness or being a French tool by Pretoria, to replace him with Mrs. Zuma really for?We have, after all, yet to see anything different from Addis Ababa regarding African trouble-spots including on the current Central African Republic (if there really is any increase in the humanitarian catastrophe that that country has been for as long as anyone can remember. Jean-Pierre Bemba is, remember, at the ICC exactly because of an earlier bout of blood-letting in that same country).Zuma, and his Tanzanian sidekick Kikwete, have also been doing the West’s dirty business of sabotaging a local solution to an African problem by making sure the ICGLR-mediated negotiations that were the precondition for the M23’s withdrawal from Goma in November last year, would go nowhere since their expedition told Kabila he could be as intransigent with his rebels as he wished since come what may, foreign forces were there to defend him no matter what.And so, as Kimenyi aptly notes, its 2013 – more than a year since Mrs. Zuma took up the reins of our continental body at the behest of her former husband – and things are no different from when the West pulverised Libya into smithereens and decided the outcome of Côte d’Ivoire’s political strife.And, even as we are told, the Central African Republic burns, with nary a sound from Addis Ababa. To paraphrase Kimenyi, things should surely be different.Mwene Kalinda, Kigali
