Mbeki and Obasanjo fly in for mini-summit

The presidents of Africa’s two most powerful nations held a mini-summit on Thursday with President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, agencies reported. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa flew in to Harare about an hour before Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo. Both headed straight to a luxury hotel where they were expected to discuss the Congo civil war and Zimbabwe’s domestic crisis with Mugabe. No details of the agenda of the meeting, which came after a series of recent regional summits on the two-year civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), were being released, said Zimbabwe Information Minister Jonathan Moyo.

Zimbabwe has 11,000 troops backing the government of President
Laurent-Desire Kabila against rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda. Zimbabwe, facing its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980, has admitted spending US $200 million over two years in the DRC, but analysts say the figure could be much higher.

Mark Malloch-Brown, a special envoy of UN secretary general Kofi Annan, arrived in Harare on Thursday and met government representatives. He’s expected to meet Mugabe on Friday before his departure on Saturday. “I hope my visit can help put in motion a broader process to re-open dialogue between all stakeholders leading to implementation of an internationally supported land reform programme,” Malloch Brown said on Thursday. In recent months the government has illegally confiscated without compensation hundreds of Zimbabwe’s 3,000 white-owned farms. This programme, combined with Zimbabwe’s costly presence in the DRC has led to many international donors cutting funding to the country.