'Sad day' as Mugabe, Tsvangirai fail to agree on power sharing

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Posted to the web: 19/01/2009 23:34:11
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe and the opposition failed to reach agreement over power-sharing talks at a meeting on Monday, an official of regional body SADC said.

"The meeting was not conclusive and ... on 25th January, the chairman of SADC is going to report to an extraordinary summit of SADC on the meeting held in Harare," Southern African Development Community executive secretary Tomaz Salomao told reporters.

"After then (the SADC summit), a public statement will be made," Salomao said after a 12-hour meeting between regional leaders, Mugabe and his opposition rivals Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara.

Regional leaders were trying to push the rival Zimbabwe parties to implement September's power-sharing agreement which has stalled amid fighting over who should control which ministries.

A unity government, delayed over the distribution of cabinet posts, is seen as the best chance of preventing total collapse in once prosperous Zimbabwe, where prices double every day and more than 2,000 people have died in a cholera epidemic.

Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) on Monday insisted on controlling several "key ministries" before any government can be formed with Mugabe, suggesting no progress had been made on the main hurdle.

South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, Mozambique leader Armando Guebuza and Thabo Mbeki, regional mediator and South Africa's former president, were hoping to persuade the rival parties to reach an agreement to save the pact.

"This is a sad day for Zimbabwe," Tsvangirai told reporters upon emerging from the Rainbow Towers Hotel in Harare, the same venue where he, Mugabe and rival opposition leader Arthur Mutambara last September 15 signed a power-sharing pact that was supposed to give rise to a unity government but has since bogged down over just how power will be shared.

Tsvangirai told reporters he is still committed to the power-sharing deal, but said Zanu PF must show its sincerity by making further concessions.

Mugabe told reporters "the meeting was not successful; it broke down."

He said SADC officials including Motlanthe had proposed a solution to get a government afoot, but Tsvangirai had tabled a counter-proposal at odds with the SADC plan.

Mugabe said he would continue talks with Tsvangirai in Harare to see if they can find common ground, before taking the discussion to the SADC summit.

Mutambara, like Tsvangirai, declared it "a sad day" for the country. He said the talks failed because Mugabe and Tsvangirai could not agree, calling their positions "untenable".

He said Zimbabwe "deserves better leaders than Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai."

Salomao said the SADC officials had made recommendations - but that these would only be made public after they have been presented to an extraordinary SADC summit to be held on January 26, either at SADC headquarters in Gaborone, Botswana, or in South Africa.

A similar summit was held in Pretoria, South Africa, in November - without yielding the hoped-for agreement between the Zimbabwean parties.

As the comments from the principals indicated, diplomatic niceties did not conceal that what most observers saw as a make-or-break negotiating session had failed to yield results.

Power-sharing remains a possibility - but an increasingly distant one.

The approach was intended to provide a structure for coexistence by the long-ruling Zanu PF party and the two rival MDC factions which in the March elections claimed a parliamentary majority but failed to unseat Mugabe.

For Zanu PF, the arrangement offered the chance of retaining a significant measure of control over the country despite the MDC's electoral inroads, while for the MDC the power-sharing solution offered hope of an end to political violence mainly targeting the opposition.

Ordinary Zimbabweans welcomed the power-sharing agreement because it promised a more politically balanced and responsible government which could, with the help of foreign donors, move to resuscitate the economy and expand food aid and other humanitarian relief. - Staff Reporter/Reuters/AP/VOA
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