SOUTH AFRICAN president Jacob Zuma has managed to persuade Zimbabwe’s rival political parties to agree to measures designed to kick start the country’s stalled powersharing deal.
On Thursday, Mr Zuma announced he and the powersharing deal’s signatories had made “great progress” during his first official attempt to mediate between the coalition partners on behalf of the South African Development Community (SADC).
“I believe that the implementation of this package will take the process forward substantially,” Mr Zuma said after two days of talks finished in Harare.
Efforts to fulfil the powersharing deal stalled recently over disagreement on the implementation of its details. Among other things, Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe was accused of unilaterally appointing his preferred candidates to senior government positions without consulting coalition partner Morgan Tsvangirai.
As well as appointing his own people as provincial governors, he assigned Zanu-PF party stalwarts to the key reserve bank governor and attorney general positions, and refused to swear in Roy Bennett of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) as deputy agriculture minister.
Mr Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party have dismissed the MDC’s grievances and accused Mr Tsvangirai of not doing enough to convince western countries to lift targeted sanctions.
It was not immediately clear what concessions Mr Mugabe and Mr Tsvangirai had agreed, as Mr Zuma refused to divulge details, saying the parties had until the end of this month to finalise all outstanding matters.
Yesterday, however, the first of the measures agreed was made public when the new media commission announced it would start to license private newspapers.
“The commission has resolved to expeditiously fulfil its mandate as outlined in the global political agreement and subsequent constitutional amendments,” it said.
“It has resolved to move with speed to introduce and implement programmes aimed at promoting development of the Zimbabwean media.”
The EU, US and other western countries all recently extended their targeted sanctions by another 12 months due to the slow progress of the powersharing deal.