Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has not been invited to the Commonwealth summit due to be held in Nigeria next month, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said on Tuesday.
”He will not have an invitation,” Obasanjo told reporters in the gardens of his farm in the southwestern Nigerian town of Otta.
Obasanjo said that he expected 52 other leaders of the Commonwealth, a global association of mainly former British colonies, to attend the meeting, which opens on December 5 in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.
But Mugabe and Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf will not be attending as their nations are suspended from the Commonwealth’s ruling councils.
Zimbabwe’s suspension came after Mugabe’s March 2002 re-election in polls that the opposition and many in the international community rejected as deeply flawed and marred by violence.
The Commonwealth suspended Pakistan’s membership after Musharraf seized power in a coup and toppled prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s elected government in October 1999.
Obasanjo told journalists invited for an informal lunch on Tuesday at his modest brick-built farmstead that he did not want the dispute over Mugabe’s attendance or non-attendance to overshadow the Commonwealth Heads of Goverment Meeting (Chogm).
He had last week visited Harare to assess Zimbabwe’s progress since the contentious elections in March last year, he said.
”It was important that I should have acquainted myself with the current situation in Zimbabwe so that Zimbabwe does not become the issue at the summit,” the Nigerian leader said.
Zimbabweans, he said, had been ”reaching out to themselves, but perhaps not quite as much as one would wish”.
Britain, Australia and Commonwealth Secretary General Don McKinnon have insisted that Mugabe should not be invited to the Abuja summit, but Obasanjo, as host, had the final say over invitations.
After his meeting last week in Harare with Mugabe, Obasanjo did not rule out the possibility of inviting his Zimbabwean counterpart to the Commonwealth summit, despite fierce opposition, mainly from white Commonwealth countries.
”I am consulting,” the Nigerian leader said then, when asked whether Zimbabwe would attend.
Mugabe, for his part, gave the impression he was preparing to pack his bags.
”We look forward to attending the Abuja Chogm,” he said, standing next to Obasanjo.
He told state media that Zimbabwe had no case to answer and should be allowed to attend the Abuja talks.
”As far as we are concerned, and even as we were placed under sanctions which expired in March … there is no case really for Zimbabwe to answer. We must be allowed to attend the Chogm 2003 in Abuja because we are a full member of the Commonwealth,” Mugabe was quoted by the Ziana news agency as telling state media.
Zimbabwe’s suspension from the Commonwealth councils was extended in March until December. — Sapa-AFP