The Democratic Alliance (DA) has harshly criticised a visit by President Cyril Ramaphosa to Zimbabwe.

Ryan Smith, the DA’s spokesperson on International Relations and Cooperation, said Ramaphosa’s unofficial visit on Sunday came at a deeply troubling moment for Zimbabwe. The visit took place as Zimbabwe’s governing party, the Zimbabwe Africa National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), moves ahead with a recently gazetted Constitution Amendment Bill, which the DA says could open the door to extended, and potentially limitless, presidential terms for Mnangagwa under the guise of technical reforms to electoral cycles and governance structures.

Smith argued that Ramaphosa’s visit sends the wrong message at a time when Zimbabwe’s ruling party is attempting to further consolidate its authority in law. Smith said South Africa’s silence on Zimbabwe’s democratic decline was no longer merely a diplomatic failure, but a moral and political choice.

The party also pointed to the arrest and detention of Zimbabwean opposition leader Tendai Biti in late March. Biti, leader of the Constitution Defenders Forum, was detained with other party members and a local journalist in Mutare in eastern Zimbabwe while trying to encourage greater public participation in the proposed constitutional amendment.

Biti, who is also a former Zimbabwean finance minister, recently wrote an article in TheCommon Sense warning about the problems with theamendment.

“It is deeply telling that both President Ramaphosa and International Relations and Cooperation Minister Ronald Lamola remained deafeningly silent when President Mnangagwa and his regime arrested and detained Zimbabwean opposition leader Tendai Biti,” Smith said.

“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,” Smith said.

He said the ANC was doing so “in favour of propping up the African fraternity of despots and dictators the ANC relies on for regional support”.

The DA also raised concern over the reported presence of Zimbabwean businessmen Wicknell Chivayo and Kudakwashe Tagwirei, whom Smith described as being known colloquially as the “Zimbabwean Guptas”. Their presence, the party said, raises serious questions about the message Ramaphosa is sending on corruption and state capture in the region.

He asked, “What was the point of the R1 billion Zondo Commission if President Ramaphosa himself has learned nothing from the outcome?”

Smith said South Africa could not claim to have confronted state capture at home while appearing comfortable with political and business networks accused of enabling similar patterns elsewhere in the region.

Smith also argued that Zimbabwe’s democratic collapse has had direct consequences for South Africa.

“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,” Smith said.

“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,” he said.

Smith said populist politicians in South Africa who fuel xenophobia and ethnic hatred 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,” he said.

“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,” Smith said.

“The ANC does not address human rights abuses out of principle, it only does so where it can gain political mileage.”

Smith also warned that the ANC’s approach poses a broader threat to regional stability, saying that South Africa continued to pretend that nothing is wrong in neighbouring countries, even as opposition movements are suppressed, civilians are abused, and democratic institutions are weakened.

“As a member of the Government of National Unity, 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,” Smith said.

“It is unsustainable and deeply unprincipled for the ANC to maintain the status quo of democratic capture on the African continent.”

Smith said that “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”.