No Sign of Let-up for Zimbabwe, Says Commonwealth Chief

Posted 11 December 2006 @ 12:17 pm EET     Print     Reprint     E-Mail     Comments

CAPE TOWN (AP) - Zimbabwe's political and economic crises show no sign of abating, Commonwealth secretary-general Don McKinnon has said in Cape Town.

"We would all like to think there could be productive change in Zimbabwe to see all these economic indicators move the other way, but there is no sign of that happening at all," he told reporters on the fringes of a Commonwealth education ministers' meeting on Monday.

On leadership, too, there were few signs of President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the country since its 1980 independence from Britain, being replaced.

"A lot of people talk about a post-Mugabe plan. We certainly have ideas. But we don't see anything coming out that suggests change is really imminent."

McKinnon referred to plans to postpone Zimbabwean presidential elections by two years to 2010 and underscored that repeated efforts by the Commonwealth, the United Nations, the Southern African Development Community and nations such as Britain and the United States had failed to stem Zimbabwe's economic slide.

"Everyone has tried and all of us have failed," he said. "With all the effort we put into it we didn't get any result at all." Asked if he had given up, McKinnon said: "We would like to see them come back into the Commonwealth. I'm looking for new ideas."

McKinnon said he had evidence that every African leader of a Commonwealth nation had publicly criticised Mugabe at one time or another, including South Africa, which has been repeatedly chastised over its policy of "silent diplomacy" towards its northern neighbour.

"The anxiety is there but clearly no one was going to want to take him head on publicly," he said, adding Mugabe's popularity on the continent should not be under-estimated. Zimbabwe's collapse was putting pressure on its neighbours, McKinnon added, with an estimated 3 million expatriates thought to be living in South Africa.

Zimbabwe currently faces four-digit inflation, massive joblessness, and growing poverty. Once a regional breadbasket, the country has increasingly relied on food aid and imports since 2000 when the government launched controversial land reforms evicting white farmers to make way for landless blacks.