Currently the debate on the Zimbabwwe crisis is centred around SADC, AU and Mbeki being inefficient, unhelpful or pliant to Mugabe and people calling at some point for the AU, UN and a new mediator to take the quest for the resolution of the Zimbabwe crisis forward.

On various fora, oral or written and through various news outlet channels there are several statements calling on SADC, AU, Montlanthe or someone to put more muscle, to have more teeth and to be more robust in trying to unlock the political logjam.

In frustration we have called SADC and AU toothless, hopeless and a huge let down yet in the same vein we then ask SADC or the AU to come up with a better strategy in the next attempt. Every time this does not happen we curse, rant, swear and wait for another summit.

For me I think there is nothing that the SADC, AU, UN, Montlanthe or anyone for that matter, can do to force Mugabe and Tsvangirai to work together if these two are not committed to working together. Even if SADC has a summit on Zimbabwe each week it will not help our cause unless these two leaders agree to work together in some way. At the moment they have not as yet found each other and they are busy drifting far apart as each day passes yet they have been negotiating amongst themselves for over two years now.

So let us not hope that the forthcoming SADC meeting will spring a miracle wand which will be a panacea to all our problems.

These two men should do some soul searching on their own before the next summit and decide whether they want to work together in some way or just forget about it and fight their own battles elsewhere on another platform.

We are tired of hearing the “we are committed to the GNU” mantra because if there was enough commitment  there should be some convergence of some sort. There is no point in going to these summits when you know you have not moved an inch from your old position and expect only one person to move while you continue digging in. If there was enough political will and commitment from both sides by now we would have a government in place.

Let us not be fooled by what these leaders say in public, it is meant to be in tune with what they know we want to hear but the truth is currently we are at a point where there is so much political grand standing and point scoring with none of the two wanting to shift their position. Why then call on SADC, AU, UN or someone to come up with a solution when we know deep down we do not want this GNU to work and leave the room only to come up with statements that lay the blame on others and not ourselves as a people?

The essence of negotiating is so we establish friendship where there was enmity, yet day in day out in Zimbabwe we are exuding high levels of intolerance and we expect an agreement to come out of these SADC summits.

Until these two men, their party structures and followers find it within themselves to work together for the common good then we might as well forget about this agreement and stop blaming everyone else but ourselves.

This entry was posted on January 26th, 2009 at 9:22 am by Sophie Zvapera and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.