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Nigeria likely to send envoy to Zimbabwe

10th December 2003

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Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo is expected to send a high-ranking envoy to Harare in the next two weeks, after Zimbabwe quit the Commonwealth, a diplomat said here Wednesday.

"Our president will send an envoy before Christmas, but when the man is coming, I am not informed, who is coming, we don't know yet," a diplomat at the Nigerian embassy in Harare told AFP.

He dismissed local media reports that Obasanjo himself would head for Harare next week.

"He will send an envoy, he did not say he is coming," said the official.

Obasanjo was last in Harare three weeks ago before he took the decision not to invite President Robert Mugabe to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), which was held in the Nigerian capital at the weekend.

The Commonwealth decided on Sunday to prolong Zimbabwe's suspension from the grouping of mainly former British colonies and appointed a seven-nation committee made up of Australia, Canada, India, Jamaica, Mozambique, Nigeria and South Africa to undertake a dialogue with Mugabe.

Mugabe said if any of them visited him, he would "welcome them in a brotherly and friendly way as leaders of their respective nations, but not as representatives of the Commonwealth," Sapa-AFP reports.

Meanwhile, Sapa writes that Zimbabwe's parliament is due to debate the country's withdrawal from the Commonwealth on Wednesday.

President Robert Mugabe's Cabinet issued its endorsement of his decision on Sunday to pull out, state radio reported on Wednesday.

Parliamentary and Cabinet approval are legally required for the move to become effective, lawyers said.

Mugabe's Zanu-PF has a comfortable majority in the 150-seat house and the motion is expected to be passed.

Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge was quoted as saying that the Cabinet, at a meeting on Tuesday, endorsed the withdrawal.

"This is Zimbabwe's final decision," he said. "It is now a government decision following the Cabinet's endorsement and is binding."

No comment could be obtained from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), but earlier this week it denounced the move as "an attempt to avoid returning the country to democratic principles."

An enraged Mugabe made the decision on Sunday night, immediately after he was told that the Commonwealth summit in Abuja, Nigeria, had decided to continue indefinitely the government's suspension from the 54-member body.

Zimbabwe was suspended in April last year, after reports that Mugabe's victory in presidential elections a month before was the result of violent intimidation and fraud. The Commonwealth secretariat said shortly before the Abuja summit that Mugabe's government had done nothing since the suspension to merit having it lifted.

The government has since attacked the Commonwealth as an "imperialist" body controlled by "the racist white Commonwealth," a reference to the white leaders of member states Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The decision recommending the suspension was openly backed by West African, Caribbean and Pacific nations, and India.

"Having taken into account our national interest, hard-won independence and the fact that the Commonwealth has decided to abandon its rules and procedures in dealing with us, it leaves us with no option but to terminate Zimbabwe's membership with effect from December 7," Mudenge said.

In an apparent attempt to ensure that not enough of its MPs would bother to turn up in parliament to outvote the MDC, Zanu-PF published orders in the state press on Wednesday, telling MPs to attend an "all important caucus" at parliament shortly before debate is due to begin - Sapa.

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