OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Friday
AFRICA’S two most powerful nations, Nigeria and South Africa, have demanded that Zimbabwe abide by its laws in its controversial program to confiscate white-owned farms.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and South African President Thabo Mbeki, after two-and-a-half hours of talks with embattled President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, stopped short of saying they had admonished Mugabe over breaches in land laws by the Zimbabwe government.
Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court has declared the government land resettlement program illegal because its “fast track” seizures do not follow legal procedures passed by Mugabe’s ruling party in April.
The government has also ignored two High Court orders to clear ruling party militants and squatters from about 1 700 white-owned farms they have illegally occupied since February.
Obasanjo told reporters he warned imbalances in land ownership could only be resolved if legal processes were followed. “What Zimbabwe should do is strictly follow the law that is already in place,” he said.
Mugabe, looking drawn and disoriented, made no remarks during a news conference after the summit. Untypically in Mugabe’s State House offices and meeting room complex, only Obasanjo, chairing the news conference, addressed reporters. Mbeki made no comments.
Obasanjo said he had been asked to mediate between Mugabe and Britain, the former colonial power, over compensation for white landowners, the descendants of colonial era British settlers, whose farms were being nationalised.
But neither Britain nor Zimbabwe had yet agreed to his mediation.
Mugabe’s government has said it will pay compensation over five years only for buildings, irrigation and other installations on land seized from blacks by white settlers.
Obasanjo said illegal land seizures affected almost all Zimbabwe’s 12.5 million people and had consequences that could spill “across borders beyond this one.”
Thursday’s mini-summit also discussed the two-year civil war in the Congo, where Zimbabwe has 11 000 troops backing the government of President Laurent Kabila against rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda.