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'Mbeki alone can't save Zim'
19/09/2007 21:08 - (SA)
Dakar - Efforts to end the crisis in Zimbabwe cannot be left to South African President Thabo Mbeki alone and Africa as a whole must do more to prevent the collapse of the country, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade has said.
Wade called Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who denies
foreign accusations that he has abused human rights and wrecked
Zimbabwe's once-prosperous economy, a "bad lawyer with a good cause" to argue.
A grouping of southern African nations has mandated Mbeki to secure a deal on constitutional reform between Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change ahead of March 2008 presidential and parliamentary polls.
But Wade, who from his small West African country has often
sparred with Mbeki in the past over leadership on African
issues, said more African heads of state, including himself,
should be involved in mediating with Mugabe.
"It's a big mistake to always say that Zimbabwe should be left to Mbeki," the Senegalese president, who like Mugabe is in his 80s, told Reuters in an interview late on Tuesday.
"Mbeki is a man who has a huge amount of goodwill but this is a situation which just one person cannot resolve alone, that much is clear," he said.
Wade, who has led peace and mediation missions in the
past for Madagascar, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau and Liberia and
is a strong advocate of continental initiatives, favoured a
broader approach involving more than one African head of state.
"I think Africa has not helped Zimbabwe. I'm convinced that we haven't helped President Mugabe," he said.
"Share his cause"
Zimbabwe, once one of Africa's most prosperous countries,
suffers the world's highest inflation, officially 6 592%,
chronic food and fuel shortages, and 80% unemployment.
Mugabe denies destroying the economy with policies like
seizing white-owned farms for landless blacks, widely blamed for
crippling the agriculture sector. He says the West has sabotaged
the Zimbabwe economy in retaliation for farm seizures.
Wade said Mugabe could have done more to canvass African
sympathy for his opposition to Zimbabwe's best farming land
remaining in the hands of a colonial-era white minority after
the country's independence in 1980.
"He could have made us share in his cause. We would have
defended him," he said.
Wade said Britain had a responsibility in the crisis because it failed to honour a 1979 accord on reforms to
end land ownership imbalances between blacks and whites.
Wade said the British government had stopped compensating
white farmers under the land redistribution reforms.
"But if African states had intervened, we could have changed
things so that Britain continued to compensate the farmers and
we could have established a climate of understanding between
Mugabe and his opponents. That wasn't done," Wade said.
But he said it was not too late for Africa to get involved.
"It's our own blood down there, our country," he said.
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