Maravi

Kabila meets Zim leaders

Kabila meets Zim leaders
By Kingsley Kaswende in Harare, Zimbabwe
Wed 04 Nov. 2009, 04:01 CAT

CONGOLESE President Joseph Kabila has separately met with Zimbabwe’s leaders in an attempt to diffuse the tension threatening their inclusive government.

President Kabila, who is SADC chairman, is on a three-day state visit to Zimbabwe.
He first held a five-hour meeting with President Robert Mugabe at State House on Monday in Harare before meeting Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara later in the evening.

"We met the President and discussed the outstanding issues but my visit is a state visit," Kabila told reporters after meeting President Mugabe. “I promised the President during the last SADC summit that I was going to visit. The nine-month-old unity government, which SADC helped set up, has been threatened by the pull-out of Tsvangirai's party, whose representatives have since boycotted Cabinet meetings in protest against ZANU-PF's alleged failure to fully implement the power-sharing pact that established the coalition government.”

At the same occasion, President Mugabe said he had briefed the SADC chair on the issues affecting the government during their meeting.

“I took this opportunity to brief him on our situation…President Kabila, as SADC chairman, will listen to all sides in the inclusive government, the mix of progress we have made and the handicaps we have encountered. He will, however, know that we are grown-ups and an intelligent people who know that we went into the agreement knowing that there will be handicaps to be met and we need to sit down and discuss the problems. He will also say there is a SADC Troika that is seized with the matter at the moment," President Mugabe said.

President Kabila's visit comes on the heels of a ministerial team from the SADC organ on politics, defence and security, better still the Troika, which has just completed a review of the allocation of ministries in the inclusive government.
The Troika, chaired by Mozambican President Armando Guebuza with Zambian President Rupiah Banda as his deputy and Swaziland 's King Mswati the third member, may meet in Maputo, Mozambique this week to discuss Zimbabwe 's troubled coalition government.

South Africa attends the Troika's meetings on Zimbabwe as mediator in the crisis.

ZANU-PF and MDC are deadlocked over the appointments of Reserve Bank governor Dr Gideon Gono and Attorney General Johannes Tomana with MDC accusing ZANU-PF of reneging on the provisions of the Global Political Agreement.

ZANU PF, in turn, accuses the MDC of reneging on a promise to push for the removal of sanctions, which were slapped by the West on its senior officials at the instigation of the MDC.

Labels: JOSEPH KABILA, SADC

posted by MrK @ 5:01 AM