The blind men of SADC: Propping up tyrants while the region burns

One could almost smell the decay of moral cowardice seeping through the screen during that dreary, virtual jamboree they dared to call the “Extraordinary Summit.”

The self-anointed elders of Southern Africa, those faded patriarchs of liberation nostalgia, gathered not to confront tyranny but to clink virtual glasses with it. And at the head of this tragic circus sat Cyril Ramaphosa — embarrassed, yes, but not enough to stop the grotesque performance.

While Tanzanians still count their dead — victims of bullets, batons, and suffocating silence — SADC’s grey-suited delegation of dignified decay found the time and gall to congratulate the woman whose hands are red with their blood. Her Excellency, Dr Samia Suluhu Hassan — Madam Dictator, the Butcher of Tanzania — was feted as though she were the face of democratic rebirth.

One wonders whether these men and women have mirrors, or whether, like vampires, they cast no reflection.

Southern Africa has never looked so pitiful. The region’s supposed custodians of democracy have become a retirement club for moral eunuchs — soft-spoken, well-fed, and utterly spineless. They gather to produce communiqués so sterile they could be used to wipe clean the evidence of their own complicity.

The communiqué in question — a masterpiece of bureaucratic rot — is an insult to the very idea of conscience. Between the lines of “regret” and “condolences” for the massacres in Madagascar and Tanzania lies the real message: “Don’t rock the boat, old friends. The blood dries fast if you look away long enough.”

And look away, they did — right before issuing their syrupy congratulations to the Butcher of Dar es Salaam. The sheer audacity of it — to mourn the dead and applaud their killer in the same breath — would make a corpse flinch.

Ramaphosa, ever the cautious diplomat, did not personally utter her name in praise, perhaps fearing a stain on his designer tie. But the summit he chaired went ahead and did it for him, sealing the region’s shame with the stamp of polite consensus. It is the kind of hypocrisy that stinks all the way to the heavens — and makes global buffoons like Donald Trump feel justified in mocking African leadership as a farce.

Who, in all honesty, would respect leaders who clap for murderers? Who nod gravely through speeches about “industrialisation and resilience” while entire nations choke on tear gas and gunpowder? These are not leaders. They are relics — relics of struggle songs long forgotten, basking in the ghostly afterglow of a liberation they no longer understand.

Their language of solidarity has turned into a dialect of decay. “Advancing industrialisation,” they say, while their people advance toward unemployment lines. “Agricultural transformation,” they chant, while farmers stare at the distant horizon for divine intervention. And “energy transition”? Don’t make us laugh — half their nations still go dark at sunset.

This is not a community of nations. It is a fellowship of cowards — a regional hospice for ageing revolutionaries who mistake inertia for diplomacy and complicity for wisdom. Their meetings, wrapped in the pomp of protocol, are little more than therapy sessions for the morally bankrupt.

The tragedy is not just their silence — it is their ceremony. Every signature on that communiqué is a eulogy for African dignity. Every polite phrase of “deep regret” mocks the fathers and mothers of the slain. Every congratulatory line to Madam Dictator is an epitaph for SADC’s soul.

And so, from the virtual comfort of their gilded castles, our regional elders anointed tyranny with their usual mixture of sanctimony and cowardice. They call it diplomacy. History will call it betrayal.

Southern Africa deserves better than these clowns in tailored suits. The future demands leaders who stand for something more than the choreography of handshakes and hollow communiqués. Until then, we remain a region governed by ghosts — men and women whose shadows are longer than their legacies, applauding the butcher while pretending to mourn her victims.

But let us not pretend this was a one-off moral lapse. SADC’s behaviour is not an anomaly; it is a tradition. From Zimbabwe’s endless purgatory under Mnangagwa’s iron grip to Eswatini’s suffocating monarchy, the regional body has perfected the art of collective blindness. Its mantra is simple: see no evil, condemn no evil, congratulate it instead.

Remember when soldiers gunned down unarmed civilians on the streets of Harare in 2018? SADC “noted with concern.” When Eswatini’s security forces unleashed live ammunition on protesters? SADC “encouraged dialogue.” And now, with Tanzania’s blood still drying on the pavement, the same chorus of moral mummification strikes up again. “Condolences” for the dead; “congratulations” for their killer.

It is a language so obscene it should come with a health warning.

To read the communiqué is to enter a museum of euphemisms. Murder becomes “unrest.” Massacre is “regrettable loss of life.” Dictatorship is “political transition.” One half expects them to describe famine as “nutritional adjustment.” It is the coward’s tongue — the bureaucratic lullaby of a region too timid to speak the truth.

And through it all, there sits Ramaphosa, playing conductor of this orchestra of the damned. The president who once promised an ethical dawn now presides over a dusk of moral exhaustion. His diplomacy, like his governance, is all velvet glove and no iron hand — the art of saying nothing elegantly.

To be “embarrassed” by tyranny but unwilling to oppose it is not diplomacy; it is cowardice with good posture.

The old men of SADC, of course, will dismiss all this as cynicism. They will talk of “stability,” of “non-interference,” of “African solutions.” What they mean is self-preservation. Each knows that to condemn tyranny across the border would invite scrutiny at home. Better to close ranks, issue a bland communiqué, and pretend the blood on their collective hands is someone else’s problem.

This is how liberation movements die — not in coups or uprisings, but in Zoom meetings full of euphemisms and self-congratulation.

The communiqué closes, as always, with that syrupy paragraph of self-adulation: the Chairperson expressing “heartfelt gratitude” for the “honour of leading the SADC region.” Heartfelt gratitude! One imagines the scene: a man thanking his colleagues for electing him master of a sinking ship.

And so they sail on, these gentlemen of the summit — all protocol and no principle, all titles and no truth. Behind them trail the ghosts of their citizens: the protesters shot in Dar es Salaam, the dissidents disappeared in Harare, the young men gunned down in Eswatini. And ahead of them, nothing — just the hollow echo of their own applause.

In the end, perhaps that is the most tragic image of all: a chorus of ageing revolutionaries clapping for a dictator, mistaking the sound for unity.

Southern Africa’s tragedy is not its poverty, nor even its corruption. It is its exhaustion — moral, political, spiritual. It is a region still speaking the language of liberation while practising the politics of surrender.

The communiqué of  7th November 2025 will not be remembered for its “resolutions” or its “themes.” It will be remembered as the day SADC finally abandoned the pretence of conscience. The day it applauded a butcher and called it progress. The day the region’s last flicker of moral light was snuffed out by the soft applause of cowards.

So here we are: a region led by men who mistake silence for diplomacy and self-preservation for statecraft. They have no moral compass left, only a revolving chair. And from that chair — for now, in Pretoria — the Clown-in-Chief presides, solemnly nodding as history turns its back on them.

Southern Africa deserves better than this charade. It deserves leaders who can tell right from wrong without consulting a communiqué. But until then, we remain trapped in the banquet hall of cowards — where murderers are toasted as presidents, and shame is served with a polite smile.