Ruling party, Kabila in secret deal

Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF party could be at the centre of a complex deal that would allegedly rake in profits worth US $300 million within the first three years of operation, the ‘Financial Gazette’ reported on Thursday. According to the report, the deal involves Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) President Joseph Kabila, Zimbabwean army generals and the Kinshasa government in exploiting vast tracts of Congolese forests.

The timber deal, said to be the largest logging contract in the world, would enable ZANU-PF companies and the Zimbabwe government to log 33 million hectares of Congolese trees in an area estimated to be one-and-a-half times the size of the United Kingdom.

According to a report by the international NGO Global Witness, the logging deal is being executed through a company called the Congolese Society for the Exploitation of Timber, whose French acronym is SOCEBO.

SOCEBO is allegedly part of a complex web of ZANU-PF businesses under the control of Zimbabwe’s powerful Speaker of Parliament and party administration boss Emmerson Mnangagwa. The deal was brokered by the late Kabila as compensation to the Zimbabwean government for its losses in money and human lives in the DRC war. President Robert Mugabe deployed the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) in the DRC after an appeal by Kabila, who was then under siege from rebels supported by Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.

Global Witness said Kabila was keen to appease Mugabe after the failure of other business ventures between the two governments such as the aborted flotation in London of Oryx Diamonds and the collapse of Congo-Duka, a joint venture between the Zimbabwe Defence Industries (ZDI) and its Congolese partner General Strategic Reserves.