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Mbeki on rescue mission

It looked like it wasn't going to be this hard when the Memorandum of Agreement was signed but I think Mbeki made a mistake by coming with a draft agreement that seemed to favour Mugabe so much and now he is on a rescue mission to make sure the parties sign a deal that will make the country move forward.

I hope that by now Mbeki has realised that his original agreement is too Mugabe centric to be of any use to Morgan Tsvangirai and therefore he has to reverse a few things to make sure that Tsvangirai has more of a say in that so called new government of national unity or whatever they will call it.

All the delays so far means that the problems in Zimbabwe continue with prices continuing to rise but worst of all is the news of a cholera outbreak in Chitungwiza.

Nothing seems to be functioning at the moment with doctors and teachers on strike and that cannot be allowed to continued for much longer.

On that note a friend of mine wrote to me from Zimbabwe and this is what he had to say about the talks:

"As for talks, it’s rather better that Morgan Tsvangirai(MRT) refused to sign as he would have endorsed a bad deal and would have been relegated to ceremonial prime minister and got blamed for his failure in a GNU.

Authority or power goes hand in hand with accountability, yet MRT was asked to agree to a deal that would require him to be accountable to Robert Mugabe (RGM) but without the requisite executive authority &/or power.

The kind of agreement that is needed is one that will bring national healing and national or people’s trust in a GNU not one that necessarily makes RGM & his cronies feel safe.

An agreement that would translate to justice and food on the table for the common man is one that’s needed as that would enable people to trust the governmental system rather than to adopt a wait and see attitude.

Above all or in addition to the foregoing, we need an agreement that would unlock the much needed aid from the West – we really need that.

Forget about China & Russia & our fellow African AU & other unpatriotic (i.e. common people uncentred) states in SADC & AU – those have not helped us with anything that matters except to applaud RGM at international summits by calling on such notions as sovereignty and blaming everything else on sanctions and colonialism and imperialism.

Why should RGM complain about sanctions when he told Tony Blair at the Earth Summit in Cape town RSA some years back that “Keep your little Britain and I will keep my Zimbabwe”. One cannot behave as though the world wasn’t a global village and expect the global village to assist him.

There has been a paradigm shift in international relations and in the international body polity, no one even wants to colonies ZIM, its territorial integrity is not a threat from anyone. We do not want a kind of sovereignty in which we destroy ourselves as has happened in the last 28 years.

MRT should insist on an agreement that curtails the powers of the state machinery – ZNA, ZRP, CIO, AFZ, etc; and empowers the Judiciary and other civil state institutions. He should just not be relegated to solving the economic mess as RGM & his kleptocracy will be working 24/7 to sabotage him just to make a political point and gain political mileage from their African compatriots.

MRT should realize that any agreement will put him on the hot seat of sorting out the mess that RGM & Company has brought upon ZIM – some kind of probationary period that if he & MDC fails, they might just have begun writing their political obituary. I think like MRT even said, “better no deal than a bad one”.

A bad deal will not unlock Western Aid & the official &/or unofficial sanctions, will not make business and commerce and the common man cooperate and stop stashing their forex in off shore accounts, will not lift ZIM from its quagmire and most of all will lead to MRT & MDC being blamed by ZANU-PF & Company for failing to stop the Titanic Ship from sinking.

Most of our fellow African brothers and sisters having been calling for a homegrown or African solution to an African problem, but for almost a decade now they have failed dismally in Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Dafur-Sudan, except in one island country where they toppled a military junta and very limited success in DRC.

There are about 5 more long serving Presidents in Africa with a lot of democratic deficits and drought of good governance who supported RGM at the Egypt Summit. What would you expect of Gaddaffi, Omar Bongo, Sudan’s Omar Al Bashir, Equatorial Guinea, Hosni Mobarik, Dos Santos. These are all long serving leaders and will see no reason why RGM can just one more term.

We thank GOD for people that love fellow Africans enough to be honest and tell the truth, these are, Rwanda, Liberia, Lesotho, Botswana, Nigeria, Zambia, etc. Mozambique is kind of on the borderline or trying to play it safe, but those guys are fed up by ZIM’s man made problems."

I hope Mbeki will be successful in his rescue mission because after all the political posturing and so on there are people's live at stake here and these I think should be the priority and hence the need to come up with a fair and equitable agreement that can take Zimbabwe forward again.

Related documents:

Jul 08 Memorandum of Understanding

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