How should South Africas Thabo Mbeki relate to the Mugabe dictatorship in Zimbabwe?
Snyder: “Thabo Mbeki is very effective when he chooses to be. And it depends on the issue. You know he is a disaster on HIV/AIDS, for instance. It took a long time to push him over on that and the health minister still doesn’t get it. But Thabo is moveable, he’s a real politician. He’s not the dictatorial kind of politician that Africa had until very recently. I don’t write Thabo off. He’s a mobile politician, he’s very good.” Snyder was particularly impressed with Mbeki’s intervention in Lesotho in September 1998, where South Africa began to act as a regional power. “That said there are no more coups, there will be no more coups or we will intervene. Now, they dragged the Botswanans in with them to make sure there was regional cover, but they reversed the coup in Lesotho. There has not been another coup in southern Africa since they set that standard. That was a big political risk to take.” He felt that Mbeki was making a mistake, however, in taking so long to break with the Mugabe di
