Mbeki to visit Harare again?

Peta said that Mugabe’s point man on electoral issues, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa, said a new constitution for Zimbabwe, which is at the core of disputes between Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), would be considered only after the elections.

Mbeki, who visited Zimbabwe more than a week ago to try to break the impasse between the sides, tried without success to persuade Mugabe to delay the elections and create room for implementing a raft of measures, including a new “transitional constitution” agreed in talks he is mediating on behalf of SADC.

“It is understood”, said Peta, “that Mbeki is planning another visit to Zimbabwe as he tries to salvage his mediation which is widely seen as having failed.

On the other hand, the opposition is struggling to come up with a firm position on whether or not to boycott the elections”, he said.

Intense discussions on the way forward are under way in both the main wing of the MDC, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, and the smaller faction headed by robotics professor Arthur Mutambara.

For any boycott to be effective, it has to be unanimous and endorsed by both factions who have been discussing a merger over the past weeks. But it seems some senior members in Mutambara’s faction, and others in Tsvangirai’s faction, are opposed to a boycott of the polls, he said.

“These are people who have made a career out of being opposition politicians and badly need their parliamentary perks to survive,” said one opposition official who did not want to be named before the party announces its official position.

The MDC must walk a fine line between participating in the polls and most probably losing, because of a skewed electoral landscape, and boycotting the polls and risking irrelevance.

Zimbabwean analysts and commentators see no point in the opposition participating in an election with a pre-determined outcome, only to cry foul when it loses.

Any boycott has to be followed by an effective civil disobedience campaign against Mugabe. But the opposition’s ability to sustain that too is very much in doubt.