The imposition of sanctions by the United States on leaders of Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF and South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) reveals the deepening tensions between Western liberal democracies and the post-liberation regimes of Southern Africa. Far from catalysing political reform, these measures risk entrenching authoritarian resilience, reinforcing a siege mentality, and accelerating geopolitical realignment toward China, Russia, and the BRICS bloc.
This essay critically examines the multidimensional impact of Western punitive strategies on regional democracy, economic sovereignty, and geopolitical orientation. It contends that sanctions, as currently deployed, are not only counterproductive but strategically short-sighted in an era of rising multipolarity and renewed resource nationalism in a mineral-rich Southern Africa.
Sanctions are often framed by Western policymakers as instruments of moral clarity — tools designed to censure rogue regimes, uphold human rights, and incentivise democratic behaviour.
Yet, in practice, when applied to post-liberation governments such as Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF or South Africa’s ANC, sanctions tend to produce the opposite effect. They deepen autocratic reflexes, narrow political pluralism, and reinforce a defensive posture in which external critique is cast as neocolonial interference.
The 2023–2025 extension of US targeted sanctions to include ANC figures — following decades of similar measures against Zimbabwe — is emblematic of this contradiction. Instead of isolating bad actors, such policies are accelerating a broader ideological and economic pivot in Southern Africa, away from Western alliances and toward new strategic partnerships with China, Russia, and fellow members of the BRICS coalition.
At the heart of this dynamic lies the liberation ethos — a powerful ideological force rooted in anti-colonial resistance and revolutionary struggle.
For ZANU-PF and the ANC, political legitimacy is not merely electoral but historical. These are parties forged in the crucible of anti-imperialist war and sustained by a narrative of sovereignty, sacrifice, and suspicion of foreign influence. In this ideological framework, Western sanctions are rarely interpreted as targeted policy tools but as imperialist weapons designed to undermine African self-determination.
This siege mentality manifests in a variety of ways: the securitisation of dissent, the vilification of civil society actors as foreign agents, and the deployment of state media to frame opposition politics as Western-sponsored subversion.
The result is a closing of democratic space under the pretext of defending national sovereignty, thereby limiting the efficacy of opposition movements and civil society.
The regional implications of US and EU sanctions are profound. Southern Africa’s liberation parties — whether in power or in solidarity — share a historical fraternity forged in exile, guerrilla warfare, and pan-African congresses. When one is targeted, all feel besieged.
The sanctions against Zimbabwe in the early 2000s triggered a backlash across SADC (Southern African Development Community), with neighbouring governments, including South Africa, consistently resisting external pressure to isolate Harare. The inclusion of ANC leaders in US sanctions lists in 2023–2025 has only deepened this solidarity.
This has created an informal bloc of liberation-era states that view Western diplomacy with increasing suspicion, preferring South–South cooperation, non-alignment, and economic relations with emerging powers over Euro-Atlantic partnerships. For the opposition, this regional realignment creates severe constraints: domestic reformers are denied regional allies, while liberation parties collectively resist any political transformation that might be construed as capitulating to Western agendas.
One of the most consequential, yet under-analysed, effects of Western sanctions has been the acceleration of Southern Africa’s economic reorientation.
Denied Western investment, aid, and credit, countries such as Zimbabwe and increasingly South Africa have turned eastward — toward China, Russia, and India. These new partnerships are not conditioned on liberal governance or democratic reform but on mutual interests in trade, infrastructure, and resource extraction.
China, in particular, has emerged as the primary financier of infrastructure across the region, underwriting energy, transport, and digital connectivity in exchange for preferential access to critical minerals such as lithium, platinum, gold, rare earth elements, and chromium. Russia, on the other hand, has expanded its presence through security cooperation and mining joint ventures, particularly in Zimbabwe’s gold and diamond sectors.
The BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) has also played a central role in shaping this new economic order.
By positioning itself as an alternative to Western-dominated institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, BRICS offers post-liberation states an ideological and economic lifeline — a space for asserting sovereignty without undergoing neoliberal structural adjustments or human rights conditionalities.
This economic realignment has significant implications for democracy. As long as regimes can access capital and markets without liberalising their domestic politics, the incentives for reform remain minimal. Sanctions, therefore, not only fail to constrain autocracy but may paradoxically insulate it from the very pressures that liberal democracy requires to flourish.
In response to democratic backsliding, many Western countries have increased support for opposition parties, independent media, and civil society organisations in Southern Africa.
While such support is often well-intentioned, it is fraught with political risk. In hyper-securitised environments where the ruling party frames all dissent as externally orchestrated, foreign sponsorship becomes a liability rather than an asset for opposition actors.
Zimbabwe offers a cautionary tale. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) — and later, the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) — have been systematically delegitimised by ZANU-PF as Western puppets.
State media routinely amplify claims of foreign funding, regime-change agendas, and neocolonial manipulation. The same narrative is beginning to take root in South Africa, where the ANC increasingly accuses its political challengers — particularly the Democratic Alliance — of being proxies for Euro-American interests.
This dynamic has a chilling effect on political participation. Civic actors are harassed; NGO licenses are revoked; opposition leaders are surveilled, arrested, or smeared.
In the long run, the perception — however unfounded — that democracy promotion is a foreign imposition erodes the legitimacy of democratic norms themselves.
Source: Thezimbabwemail
