The Southern African Development Community (Sadc) will not give up its mediation role on Zimbabwe despite recent attacks by some political elements in Harare, MDC president Welshman Ncube has said.
Ncube told NewsDay in Gweru over the weekend that Sadc would pile more pressure at the extraordinary summit on Zimbabwe scheduled for May 20 in Windhoek, Namibia. Ncube said the bloc was getting impatient with Zimbabwe but would not abandon its member state.
“That is not possible (to abandon) as Zimbabwe is part of the Sadc family . . . it might use different strategies and get impatient as expressed by their Livingstone Troika communiqué but Sadc can’t just walk away from Zimbabwe. That is not conceivable,” Ncube said. Sadc is the guarantor for Zimbabwe’s two-year-old coalition government between President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC-T and Ncube’s MDC. President Jacob Zuma of South Africa is the Sadc-appointed facilitator. Ncube said Sadc was likely to pursue its tough stance launched at its Troika summit in Livingstone, Zambia, a few weeks ago.
“After the rebuke that we saw at the Livingstone summit we expect it to continue at the next full summit in Namibia,” said Ncube.
“When we talk as government we are unanimous that these sad developments on violence and selective arrest of members of other political parties should end. We hear repeatedly from Zanu PF that they do not sanction violence and if that be true, then it means someone somewhere is running a shadow parallel government,” he said.
The Sadc Troika demanded an immediate cessation of political violence, intimidation, hate speech and political harassment which have reared their ugly heads after only a season of relative calm. The resolutions were the first stinging rebuke President Mugabe has received from his counterparts since 2007.
