President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria met with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in Harare on Monday, ahead of next month’s Commonwealth summit to which Mugabe has not been invited.
President Obasanjo arrived in the Zimbabwean capital Harare early on Monday for a day of talks, and met Mugabe for about 30 minutes in a hotel in the centre of Harare, an AFP correspondent reported.
They were supposed to meet again at about noon.
Obasanjo then met with Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai for about 45 minutes.
Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), refused to make any comments after the meeting with the Nigerian leader.
This year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting is due to take place in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, from December 5 to 8, but Zimbabwe’s leader has yet to receive an invitation.
Zimbabwe has been suspended from the Commonwealth’s councils for the past 20 months following the March 2002 presidential elections that returned Mugabe to power in polls that the opposition and many in the international community rejected as deeply flawed and marred by violence.
Britain, Australia and Commonwealth Secretary General Don McKinnon have insisted that Mugabe should not be invited to the Abuja summit.
But Obasanjo, as the host of the summit, holds the key to invitations to the meeting and his spokesperson, Remi Oyo, would not entirely rule out a change of plan.
“Every new day presents its challenges,” Oyo said on Sunday. “I don’t think we should make any definitive statement.”
Press reports in Harare suggested that Mugabe is lobbying for a last-minute invitation to the three-day Abuja summit, which will be formally opened by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II on December 5. — Sapa-AFP
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