A Southern African bloc on Sunday announced humanitarian aid for Zimbabwe as the country battles food shortages and a deadly cholera outbreak that has killed more than 1 120 people.
”We are here to launch the initiative and find out how far we are in terms of delivering the required assistance,” Southern African Development Community (SADC) executive secretary Tomaz Salamao said.
The undisclosed amount of assistance follows a visit by a SADC team led by South Africa two weeks ago to assess the country’s humanitarian crisis.
Salamao said part of the package was South Africa’s R300-million-worth donation of seed, fertilisers and fuel to help revive the country’s agricultural sector.
South Africa had maintained that it will hold off any kind of aid assistance to Zimbabwe until a unity government is in place.
”This is regional solidarity. When you are facing difficulties, you have to count on the solidarity of your brothers. We cannot fail in assisting Zimbabwe, that’s the critical and most important thing,” said Salamao.
Regional countries who contributed to the package include Tanzania, Botswana and Namibia.
On Sunday, the United States announced that it will not extend aid to Zimbabwe as long as Robert Mugabe remains president.
Once hailed as a model economy, Zimbabwe’s fortunes have nosedived since 2000 when Mugabe seized white-owned farms and handed them over to landless black Zimbabweans, often with no farming skills.
Plans to form a power-sharing government between Mugabe and his rivals have been stalled by disagreements over the allocation of key ministries.
The top US envoy for Africa said on Sunday Zimbabwe’s power-sharing deal cannot work with Mugabe as president, but the defiant 84-year-old has said he will not go to his ”political death”.
”We have lost confidence in the power-sharing deal being a success with Mugabe in power. He has lost touch with reality,” said Jendayi Frazer, US Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs.
Frazer was in South African to consult with regional leaders about the deteriorating political and economic crises in Zimbabwe.
Mugabe is ”completely discredited” and Southern African leaders now want to know ”how do they facilitate a return to democracy without creating a backlash like a military coup or some sort of civil war”, she said.
Washington’s tough talk on Zimbabwe comes after Mugabe announced last week that Zimbabwe ”is mine” and that he would never surrender to Western pressure to resign.
Mugabe, who has been in power since Zimbabwe’s independence from Britain in 1980, used his Zanu-PF party’s 10th annual congress this weekend to brush off the mounting international pressure.
”They now want to topple the Mugabe government. ‘Mugabe must go because Bush is going’,” he said, referring to US President George Bush, who leaves office in late January and is among the world leaders calling for Mugabe’s resignation.
”Zimbabweans will refuse that one of their sons must accompany Bush to his political death,” Mugabe said in his speech on Saturday.
He also urged his party to remain united to avoid a repeat of its historic election defeat in March, when the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won control of Parliament.
However, the MDC ceded the presidency to Mugabe when challenger Morgan Tsvangirai pulled out of a second-round run off citing violence against his supporters.
Talks have stalled over implementing a power-sharing deal that would have left Mugabe as president and made Tsvangirai prime minister.
With the two sides deadlocked, Frazer said that ”there has been no government in that country since the March elections”.
Mugabe threatened this month to hold new elections ”in the next one-and-a-half to two years” if the power-sharing arrangement fails. — AFP
