Back to Index

This article participates on the following special index pages:

MDC leaders 'feeling used', decide to sever ties with SA government
Peta Thornycroft and Beauregard Tromp, Cape Times
April 20, 2005

http://www.capetimes.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=271&fArticleId=2488826

Contact between the South African government and Zimbabwe's main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), has ceased. MDC secretary-general Welshman Ncube, who was the main contact between the two, said at the weekend: "I am not available to the South Africans any longer."

Paul Themba Nyathi, MDC spokesperson, said: "From his point of view, he acted in good faith, in seriousness, and he discovered he had been used, so one should imagine he is intractably angry. That is what has happened."

William Bango, spokesperson for MDC president Morgan Tsvangirai, said: "He is not talking to the South Africans either as far as I know."

A senior South African foreign affairs source said the news of the MDC's decision had come as a shock.

"We haven't heard anything from them. We've been talking to them and of course they weren't happy with the result of the election and about what the observers had to say. But nothing like this," he said.

The ruling Zanu PF won 78 out of 120 elected parliamentary seats at the March 31 election which, together with 30 MPs appointed by President Robert Mugabe, gives it a two-thirds majority allowing it to change the constitution.

The MDC won 41 seats, down 16 from 2000 when it came within three seats of winning a parliamentary majority.

The opposition claims the results were rigged and that the voters' roll is in a shambles. Meanwhile, several diplomatic missions, including South Africa, are becoming increasingly alarmed at yet another sudden dive in the economy off an already low base.

With domestic debt having trebled since February, to $1,1-billion (about R6,8-billion) according to information on the website of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, foreign currency reserves now meet less than 10 percent of demand from the productive sector.

Street traders in central Harare said on Tuesday that the black market rate for the dollar was now more than treble the auction rate at the Reserve Bank. One woman, ostensibly selling tomatoes but offering to buy foreign currency, said South African rands were trading at R1 to ZIM$3 100.

Inflows of forex from annual tobacco sales which began this month are way down because of a poor quality crop and reduced volumes. Manufacturers of cooking oil, margarine and soap put in for $5-million for inputs and got $300 000 at a recent Reserve Bank auction.

Already, cooking oil and soap powder have largely disappeared from supermarket shelves, in addition to sugar and mealie meal which are only rarely available.

Relative price stability over the last year has ended, and reductions in inflation have bottomed out and prices are now galloping ahead. No one, least of all consumers, believes the Reserve Bank's figure of less than 130 percent inflation as at the end of February. Private sector economists say it is somewhere between 300 and 400 percent.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP