27 October 2008
Harare — Mozambican President Armando Guebuza is scheduled to chair a meeting in Harare on Monday of the SADC (Southern African Development Community) Organ on Political, Defence and Security Cooperation, which will attempt to find a way out of the current impasse in Zimbabwe.
This body is currently a troika consisting of Swaziland, Mozambique and Angola. The chairperson is the Swazi King, Mswati III, but since he is unable to attend due to prior commitments in Swaziland, Guebuza will be in the chair.
The meeting is a continuation of that held a week ago in the Swazi capital, Mbabane. Then the troika discussed the Democratic Republic of Congo and Lesotho, but refused to discuss Zimbabwe in the absence of Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and the man who won the first round of the presidential election on 29 March.
Under the power-sharing agreement of 15 September, Tsvangirai is Prime Minister designate. Despite this, the regime of Robert Mugabe, president of the ruling ZANU-PF, has refused to renew Tsvangirai's passport. Faced with this humiliation, Tsvangirai declined to go to Mbabane without a passport.
The power sharing agreement is on the verge of collapse due to the refusal of ZANU-PF to share power in any meaningful way. The agreement, mediated by former South African president Thabo Mbeki, provides for a government of 31 Ministers, 15 to be appointed by ZANU-PF, 13 by Tsvangirai's MDC, and three by a breakaway MDC faction led by Arhur Mutambara.
But the agreement's fatal weakness was its failure to give any precise allocation of the ministries, and so ZANU-PF has insisted on keeping all the most powerful ministries for itself - notably the Ministries of Defence, Home Affairs (which controls the police), Foreign Affairs, Finance, Local Government and Information.
Of these, the only one that ZANU-PF is prepared to relinquish is finance. But the MDC argues that it is not tolerable to allow all the defence and security levers to remain in ZANU-PF hands, and this, if ZANU-PF retains the Defence Ministry, the MDC must control Home Affairs.
Despite the continued refusal of the regime to treat him as Prime Minister, Tsvangirai has decided to attend the Harare meeting, alongside Mugabe and Mutambara.
Also present are Swazi Prime Miniter Sibusiso Dlamini, Angolan Foreign Minister Assuncao dos Anjos, and the current chairperson of SADC, South African President Kgalema Motlanthe. Mbeki has been retained as mediator, but now as a private citizen, and so his position is much weakened. SADC's Executive Secretary, former Mozambican Transport Minister Tomas Salomao, is also attending the meeting.
Read comments. Write your own.
Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
This old "president" or a dying population now being pursuaded by those young enough to be his grandchildren to see sense, and still refusing ! How far can humanity sink before it is reclassified as something else?