Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa has spurned President Cyril Rampahosa’s attempt to mediate in Zimbabwe’s political crisis, telling his party’s central committee his government will not entertain foreign attempts to mend the country’s internal problems.
Ramaphosa has sent two delegations to Zimbabwe in recent weeks, the first a three-member team of senior government officials and the second a high-powered ANC delegation led by party secretary-general Ace Magashule. Both have met the same fate, returning home empty-handed.
Zimbabwe is in the grips of its worst economic crisis in a decade, with inflation now the second highest in the world after Venezuela. Public sector workers are earning about $125 a month, while close to half the population is facing hunger. Public protests have been brutally put down and leading activists arrested and jailed.
Faced with the prospect of poverty-stricken Zimbabweans flooding into SA to survive, Ramaphosa attempted to intervene, but on Friday Mnangagwa provided the best indication yet that the SA president is on a wild-goose chase.
“They said there was a crisis in Zimbabwe ... the crisis exists in their minds, it exists in the parties, the crisis exists in their bedrooms, not in Zimbabwe. We have challenges like any other country in the region ... has challenges, and we are resolved to face these challenges head-on.
“We will not seek outside mediation to deal with challenges which [they] themselves have,” Mnangagwa told the Zanu-PF central committee, the governing party’s highest decision-making body.
Mnangagwa said he talks to Ramaphosa frequently, and denied there is any misunderstanding between Zanu-PF and the ANC.
“Furthermore, the solidarity existing between Zanu-PF and the sister revolutionary party from SA can never be shaken by social media ... I can assure you almost on a weekly basis ... I discuss with my counterpart Ramaphosa, I discuss with my brother [Botswana President Mokgweetsi] Masisi, with [Namibia President Hage] Geingob. Before we sleep, we chat, we can laugh [at] social media insinuations. So they are wasting their time.”
At the weekend a group of Western ambassadors and academics implored the international community to “act now to help end abhorrent abuses by Zimbabwe’s government”.
The grouping, dubbed the Zimbabwe Working Group, said: “As a group of policy practitioners, activists, former diplomats and academics, the Zimbabwe Working Group deplores repressive actions by the Zimbabwean government that have intensified human suffering and trampled constitutional rights.
“We welcome initial efforts by the SA government to address this crisis. We urge the international community to press for an immediate stop to the Zimbabwean government’s severe human rights abuses, for the withdrawal of the armed forces from politics, and an end to the plundering of the country’s ravaged economy by the ruling Zanu-PF party and senior security officials.”
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