Johannesburg — PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma arrives in Harare today amid speculation that President Robert Mugabe is gravely ill and a promise from his party that he will be more vocal in criticising Mugabe.
Zuma is expected to mediate outstanding issues dividing Zimbabwe's unity government.
African National Congress (ANC) secretary-general Gwede Mantashe indicated yesterday Zuma would be critical of Mugabe's "adolescent" and "deviant" behaviour. "President Zuma will be more vocal in terms of what we see as deviant behaviour by our neighbours," Mantashe told the Foreign Correspondents' Association.
Zuma is due to meet Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara. The South African leader is to open the Harare Agricultural Show tomorrow.
It is understood that Mugabe and his family were on a holiday in Dubai, which sparked speculation that he had travelled there for medical treatment.
Information Minister Webster Shamu yesterday dismissed as false reports of Mugabe's ill health. "The reports are false, they are just gross lies. It's absolute rubbish that the president is ill," he said. Mugabe's spokesman, George Charamba, was not available for comment.
Zuma is the chairman of the Southern African Development Community, and he has pledged to help resolve the dispute between Mugabe, Tsvangirai and Mutambara on outstanding issues.
They include a dispute over the sharing of posts for provisional governors, the "unprocedural" appointments of Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono for a second term and that of attorney-general Johannes Tomana, the prosecution and swearing in of Deputy Minister of Agriculture Roy Bennett and the arrests of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) MPs.
There is also disagreement on constitutional reform and appointments of members of constitutional commissions.
The MDC wants Zuma to pressure Mugabe to stick to the political agreement signed last September. It gave the ANC a memorandum of issues it wants Zuma and the party to take up with Mugabe.
These include halting the persecution and harassment of MDC members. With Michael Bleby and Hopewell Radebe
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The visit of Zuma confirms the rotten dictatorship of criminal Mugabe! It's a shame to an independent nation that someone else from a neighbour country should come pressurize an illegitimate leader to respect provisions of a political agreement.
Mugabe was indeed in Dubai for medical treatment. That in itself brings shame on a once prosperous nation which the tyrant has engineered into bankruptcy.
Devil-appointed dieing Mugabe must just leave power and let Tsvangirai give a new lease of life to Zimbos - something Mugabe failed during his 29 yrs of lunatic rule.
What a NATION? to let Mugabe go to Dubai for medical treatment tells you a lot about zimbabwe and its people. I can only laugh! We suffer through no hospitals or medicines at home but the illigitimate president goes to a foreign country to be treated. HAHA. Is magape too scared he will get AIDS or cholera if he goes to a local hospital? Then we have the idiot brigade who tell us he isnt sick? So if he is well then he went for a holiday. Now i am an internationally travelled man and you cant go far on a hundred US dollars a month as Mugape told us he was earning? As a matter of fact you can hardly get a taxi for less. So if he was in Dubai did Gono slip him some more stolen USA dollars from one of my brothers foreign bank accounts in Zimbabwe? Brothers go and check your balances because someone is taking more than his share! now we have Zuma attending to Mugape. What is he going to say to Mugabe, keep on in office you are doing a good job. HAHA. Again we my dear brothers in Zimbabwe need to wake up. ZANUPF have told us so many times that Zimbabwe is a sovereign state and doesnt listen to outside "word". HAHA Why listen in deed to Zuma? There is only one thing that needs to happen to make zimbabwe work that is for Mugape to resign, retire, die or run away to malaysia. zanupf will collapse and become what it is and should be - a redundant political party.