Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe on Monday expressed satisfaction with the outcome of a regional summit which discussed the country’s electoral roadmap, saying the meeting went “very well”.
“It came out very well,” Mugabe told reporters on his return from Johannesburg after Southern African Development Community leaders pressured Zimbabwe to make democratic reforms before holding elections.
The veteran leader added that facilitator South African Preident Jacob Zuma gave a “very good report” on the progress of the power-sharing deal with long time-rival Prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai.
“He [Zuma] acknowledged the efforts that the global political agreement is making, in other words what our negotiators and the principals put together are making, and that there is progress now that there is work going on to establish the road map, that the highlights of the road map have been marked … what remains now are the timelines,” Mugabe said.
Endorsement of Livingstone resolutions
On Sunday, regional leaders from the 15-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) called on Mugabe and Tsvangirai to speed up implementation of the power-sharing deal that brought them together in an uneasy coalition government in 2009.
The leaders stopped short of the unusually harsh language used in March by the regional bloc’s troika which called for an end to political violence and insisted that promised reforms be carried out.
Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party also welcomed the outcome of the meeting.
“We are pleased that the summit has noted and endorsed the Livingstone resolutions,” secretary for international affairs James Timba told the independent NewsDay newspaper after the summit.
“We are equally pleased that the summit has directed that the parties should immediately develop time limits of the agreed road map.”
While the summit had been expected to agree a road map to lay out a new timetable for the constitution and elections, leaders pushed that decision back to their next summit in August. – AFP