LUSAKA

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) heads of state meeting this week in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, is to put the Zimbabwean crisis "high on the agenda", and is poised to take "practical steps" to resolve the country's problems, the regional body's deputy executive secretary, Joao Caholo, told IRIN on Tuesday.

"It's not going to be mere rhetoric but practical steps, because we have already set the issue in motion. In March this year, at the SADC extraordinary meeting in Tanzania, the executive secretary [Tomaz Salomão] was mandated to do a report on the Zimbabwe economy, while [South African] President [Thabo] Mbeki was tasked to mediate [between the ruling ZANU-PF government and opposition parties]," Caholo said.

"Both of them will present their findings, which will then form the basis of the summit decisions on addressing the Zimbabwe situation. Everything is in place to fully tackle the Zimbabwe issue." Caholo declined to elaborate until after the 14-nation regional bloc had discussed Zimbabwe's crises. The summit convenes on Thursday.

In 2000 President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF government launched its fast-track land-reform programme, in which white-owned commercial farmland was handed over to landless Zimbabweans, setting in motion a chain of events that has seen the country's inflation rate top 13,000 percent, according to the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe (CCZ) and unemployment reach 80 percent. More than a third of the population will be in need of food aid by early next year.

During this period, the international community, particularly the European Union (EU) and US, has accused the SADC of passively observing the collapse of what was once one of the continent's strongest economies.

"SADC has never been quiet on the Zimbabwe issue in the past; we have been working in the background, so I wouldn't like to comment on why we are now talking of dealing with the Zimbabwe issue, or having to come up with practical steps on the issue," Caholo told IRIN.

Jennifer Kabbo, the sub-region director of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, said Zimbabwe's "deteriorating economy and political instability is a major source of concern, and it has affected the economic growth of the SADC region as a whole," she told IRIN.

"Once concerted efforts are put in place and the crisis in Zimbabwe is reduced to manageable levels, the Southern African region will perform a lot better because it has the potential to become the richest region in Africa."

Analysts sceptical about SADC

The belief that the summit could be a watershed for Zimbabwe was dismissed by Mulenga Chileshe, director of Institute for Economic and Social Research at the University of Zambia.

"Judging from history, we are all sceptical whether SADC will really pass any resolution that can bring immediate change to Zimbabwe. The organisation has all along displayed a culture of keeping silent," Chileshe said.

As many as three million Zimbabweans, or a quarter of the population, are thought to have left Zimbabwe in search of work in the past seven years, mostly in neighbouring states, such as South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Malawi.

Robert Mtonga, a Lusaka-based consultant to Zambia's foreign ministry, said such large-scale migration presented "serious security concerns, which could become deadly if the SADC meeting ignored the Zimbabwe crisis".

"SADC countries can't afford to play silent diplomacy on Zimbabwe; they would be abrogating their own responsibility. They are talking about creating a SADC [peacekeeping] standby force; then what is it going to be doing if they can't resolve a simple civil case in Zimbabwe?" he said.

"Certainly, the situation in Zimbabwe won't be resolved just now, but what is encouraging is that there are already meetings going on between President Mugabe and the MDC [Movement for Democratic Change opposition party]," Mtonga told IRIN.

Political negotiations

Mbeki, mandated by the SADC to find a political solution to the crisis, finally managed to bring representatives of Zimbabwe's government and opposition parties together last week, after Mugabe's negotiators failed to arrive for talks in South Africa in mid-July.

The opposition wants the negotiations to create the conditions for the holding of free and fair elections, through constitutional reforms and a dilution of the powers of the presidency.

Presidential and parliamentary polls have been scheduled for March 2008; Mugabe, who is now 83 and has ruled Zimbabwe since its independence from Britain in 1980, intends to again contest the elections as ZANU-PF's presidential candidate.

The parties involved in negotiations - ZANU-PF and both factions of the MDC - have agreed not to discuss the talks with the media, although all said the negotiations would not stop ongoing political activity.

Arthur Mutambara, the president of one MDC faction, told IRIN, "Zimbabweans cannot outsource their emancipation and liberation to foreigners. We must not be solely dependent on the Mbeki initiative, we must have an alternative programme of action - one that seeks to achieve conditions for free and fair elections. In the battle to make Zimbabwe a peaceful, democratic and prosperous nation, we must be masters of our own destiny."