The IMF says the country may soon win back aid

Zimbabwe has made progress in its bid to win back aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but many contentious issues still remain unresolved, a Fund official said on Monday, Reuters reported. El Tigani Ibrahim, the IMF’s resident representative in South Africa, told reporters that a recent mission to Harare had made some headway “and the indications are that we could be headed for an agreement,” Ibrahim told a Reuters Foundation workshop for business journalists in South Africa.

Over the past year, Western donors led by the IMF have suspended funding to Zimbabwe over policy differences with President Robert Mugabe, plunging the country deeper into its worst economic crisis in decades. Donors have disagreed with Mugabe’s deployment of a quarter of his army in a costly two-year-old war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Relations deteriorated further this year over the illegal occupation of hundreds of white-owned farms by self-styled liberation war veterans, and Mugabe’s plan to seize white-owned lands for black resettlement.

UNDP head Mark Malloch Brown told Mugabe earlier this month during a meeting in Harare that the international donor community would not support land reforms unless Mugabe addressed law and order problems. Ibrahim said the Zimbabwe crisis had affected the entire southern African region because of a view by global investors that troubles in one African country on the continent inherently spilled over to the next. He added that fixing the troubled Zimbabwe economy and calming political tensions lay at the heart of resolving the crisis and returning investor confidence.