The summit dashed these baseless expectations by giving Mugabe and his delegation a resounding welcome and offering him the now too familiar solidarity proclamations which nevertheless are meaningless on the ground.

What is the explanation of what happened in Lusaka?

Notable from this saga is not that the Lusaka Sadc summit, in the footsteps of its predecessors since 2000, did not do anything about resolving the Zimbabwean crisis but that anyone actually expected the summit to do something when the fact is that there is really nothing meaningful that Sadc can do.

Sadc was not set up, and therefore does not have mechanisms, to deal with national questions such as that dogging Zimbabwe today.

What further weakens Sadc’s capacity to intervene in Zimbabwe is that, as a development and not a political community, the regional grouping was actually created to seek, receive and manage donor funding as opposed to pursuing work funded from the coffers of its member states who in fact have failed to even pay for the construction of their own headquarters.

Another fact is that donors who have been boycotting Zimbabwe since 2000 are currently boycotting Sadc because of its perceived solidarity with Zimbabwe under Mugabe and Zanu PF.

But the same donors are not boycotting individual Sadc members. Some Sadc countries like Mozambique continue to receive tremendous budgetary support from donors.

What this means is that Sadc countries can afford to play summit games as happened in Lusaka last week by proclaiming meaningless solidarity with Mugabe to the detriment of the regional grouping as long as that solidarity does not harm the relationship of individual members states with the donor community.

The intended transformation of Sadc from a development coordination conference — that emerged from the ashes of the Frontline States — to a development community with binding political and economic obligations on its members has not yet materialised and is not about to happen.

A significant number of Sadc members also belong to Comesa while others belong to the Southern African Customs Union (Sacu) with the former promising a potentially much more lucrative and dynamic market than the latter which is rooted in apartheid South Africa.

Among the continent’s regional groupings, Sadc is arguably the only one with between little and no political or economic influence on its members.

For example, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) and the East African Community (EAC) are better able than Sadc to deal with their collective interests including to address problematic national questions facing their members as happened with Ecowas in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

While there is a widespread belief in Zambia and Malawi that Zimbabweans should solve their own internal problems in the same way that Zambians and Malawians did when they respectively removed from power through electoral means Kenneth Kaunda and his Unip party and Kamuzu Banda and his Malawi Congress Party, this otherwise correct belief fails to appreciate the depth and breadth of the Zimbabwean crisis in so far as it is about an unresolved national governance question and not merely about electoral politics.

In 1998 political order and stability in Lesotho and the Democratic Republic of Congo were not restored through electoral politics. Any suggestion that elections can or will resolve the Zimbabwean crisis is either disingenuous or ignorant.

No national question anywhere in the world has ever been resolved through electoral politics.

In any case, the Zimbabwean economy cannot afford massive elections.

Elections are useful in changing governments or administrations where regime rules of governance are settled.

But elections are utterly useless where such rules are contested as is the case in Zimbabwe and indeed as was the case in Lesotho in 1998 and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Put differently, during the liberation struggle in this country, there is no sane person who thought that Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front could have been removed from power between 1965 and 1979 through elections without changing the regime rules of governance.

The armed struggle was waged precisely in order to change the regime rules of governance and the 1979 Lancaster House constitutional talks were useful only in so far as they altered the scheme of regime rules of governance to introduce for the first time in the country a justiciable Bill of Rights and pave way for democratic elections which should have in turn institutionalised democratic governance.

Unfortunately for Zimbabweans, whereas the 1980 elections put in power a government from the liberation movement led by Mugabe, that government and its leader inherited the entire gamut of the brutal Rhodesian scheme of regime rules in the form of the state of emergency declared in November 1965.

Consequently, the new liberation government extended the 15 year old Rhodesian state of emergency by another 10 years from 1980 to 1990. What this means is that from 1965 to 1990 the regime rules of governance in this country were manifestly defined by a vicious state of emergency whose essence was to suspend the implementation of a justiciable Bill of Rights and unleash Gukurahundi.

Whereas Ian Smith ruled this country for 15 years under an officially declared state of emergency, Mugabe ruled it for 10 years under similar cruel circumstances from 1980 to 1990 leaving a difference of only five years between Smith’s and his emergency rule.

During that period, Mugabe made it clear that he was an apostle of the one party state and that therefore he wanted to be president for life while Zanu PF, especially after the 1987 Unity Accord, made it clear that it wanted this country to be a legalised one party socialist state.

The contested regime rules of governance in Zimbabwe cannot be understood properly outside this background.

Although the state of emergency and the one party state are no longer law in formal terms, they remain the name of the game and the political culture in de facto terms.

It is only in this very fundamental but quite nuanced sense that Zimbabwe does indeed require regime change whose meaning is not as narrow as merely changing the government of the day or removing Mugabe from office through elections.

Apart from the fact that Sadc does not have a strategic capacity to intervene to resolve Zimbabwe’s national question, there is no evidence that there is any understanding within Sadc of the contested scheme of regime rules of governance in Zimbabwe as the primary cause of the current conflict in the country beyond the sanctions discourse.

Indeed, the same regime scheme is not understood by those who continue to expect Sadc to take tough action on Zimbabwe.

The only systematic attempt to change the scheme of regime rules of governance in Zimbabwe since Independence in 1980 was in 1999 when Mugabe set up a constitutional reform process under the auspices of the Constitutional Commission.

Sadc did not support that golden opportunity nor did the donor community and many in the opposition and civil society in Zimbabwe who today expect Sadc to suddenly do something to rein in Mugabe.

What happens next does not depend on Sadc but primarily on Zimbabweans.