SA’s Support for Entrenching ZANU-PF Dictatorship

Statement by Ryan Smith MP – DA Spokesperson on International Relations and Cooperation:

The Democratic Alliance (DA) condemns, in the strongest possible terms, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s unofficial visit to Zimbabwean President, Emmerson Mnangagwa’s private residence on Sunday. This visit takes place as the ruling ZANU-PF attempts to entrench its dictatorship in Zimbabwean law through the recently gazetted Constitution Amendment Bill No. 3, which would introduce far-reaching proposals to usher in extended and potentially limitless presidential terms for the ZANU-PF under the guise of technical reforms to electoral cycles and governance structures.

It is deeply telling that both President Ramaphosa and International Relations and Cooperation Minister (DIRCO), Ronald Lamola, remained deafeningly silent when President Mnangagwa and his regime arrested and detained Zimbabwean opposition leader, Tendai Biti on the afternoon of 21 March 2026. Biti, who is the leader of the Constitution Defenders Forum (CDF), was detained by state authorities along with other party members and a local journalist in the town of Mutare while trying to incentivise greater public participation in the proposed constitutional amendment.

While the Presidency has tried to spin this visit as an “in-person catch-up between two neighbours”, it is blatantly clear that once again South African foreign policy under the African National Congress (ANC) continues to sideline our constitutional values of freedom, democracy, and human rights in favour of propping up the African fraternity of despots and dictators the ANC relies on for regional support.

Furthermore, the presence of Zimbabwean businessmen Wicknell Chivhayo and Kudakwashe Tagwirei, known colloquially as the Zimbabwean Guptas, raises serious questions around President Ramaphosa’s semblant support for regional corruption and state capture on an international scale. What was the point of the R1 billion Zondo Commission if President Ramaphosa himself has learned nothing from the outcome?

Zimbabwe’s democratic backslide is the sole reason for the immigration crisis South Africa has been subjected to since the late 90s, which places a tremendous burden on civic and social services, and stokes violent societal division in our country. It is not the people of Zimbabwe who are to blame for fleeing to South Africa for a better life, it is President Ramaphosa and the ANC who continue to ignore human rights abuses and democratic capture in their own backyard out of pure political expediency.

Populist South African politicians who continue to stoke the flames of xenophobia and ethnic hatred in our country are merely capitalising on the symptom of a problem the ANC itself has created. For as long as South Africa refuses to stand up and condemn dictators and human rights abusers on our continent, our country will forever be the only place of asylum for the refugees the ANC continues to create. This is yet another example of the ANC’s diplomatic hypocrisy as it selectively addresses human rights abuses elsewhere in the world while ignoring the same acts just next door. The ANC does not address human rights abuses out of principle, it only does so where it can gain political mileage.

It is blatantly clear that the ANC has no interest in the regional stability of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) or its members as the South African government continues to pretend that nothing is wrong in neighbouring democracies, that civilians are not massacred in the streets by their governments, or that opposition is violently stifled and contained. The ANC’s cognitive dissonance between South Africa’s diplomatic responsibilities as a regional power and its own interests as a political party is the single largest threat to SADC’s stability and prosperity.

As a member of the Government of National Unity (GNU), the DA rejects the ANC’s attempts to openly fraternise with neighbouring dictators and deny the lived reality of millions of persecuted Zimbabweans who live in international limbo as a result. It is unsustainable and deeply unprincipled for the ANC to maintain the status quo of democratic capture on the African continent. Tens of thousands of South Africans lost their lives in the fight for freedom, yet today’s ANC sits side by side with the enemies of freedom across the continent.