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Regional ministers of defence and security last week moved to drastically clip President Mugabe’s powers in the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) Organ on Politics, Defence and Security, the ‘Zimbabwe Independent’ reported on Friday. The ministers, who met in Harare on Thursday last week to discuss the fate of the contentious SADC offshoot, recommended to Mugabe, — current chair of the organ, that the agency be attached to SADC’s structures and not function as an autonomous body.
The status of the organ has been in dispute since Zimbabwe first proposed it as a replacement to the Frontline States in Windhoek in 1994. While SADC heads of state and government agreed in the Gaborone Communique of June 28, 1996 to establish the agency, its draft protocol had not been ratified, depriving it of a legal mandate. Mugabe has been accused by his SADC counterparts of hijacking the organ to pursue an aggressive interventionist policy in the region.
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