The SADC facilitation team on Zimbabwe has confirmed that it did not discuss the crucial question of security sector reforms, when they met representatives of political parties in the coalition government last week.

The security sector is widely blamed for inflicting violence on those opposed to ZANU PF, especially during elections. The MDC-T has been ardently calling for the reforms, but these are being resisted by army chiefs and Robert Mugabe. This month the MDC-T reportedly said it was not happy with the road map for elections because it does not address reform of the military, to ensure the country’s generals and other top officers do not meddle in electoral politics.

But facilitator Lindiwe Zulu told SW Radio Africa on Monday that the issue will be discussed at a later stage, despite it being a key stumbling block to progress. Zulu said the main purpose of the trip last week was to look at the road map to the elections, especially to set the time frames.

“We had meetings with the different political parties, not necessarily the negotiators as a whole. We are going to have a meeting with the negotiators very soon so that we can look at the time frames, and what that means and what are the plans around that,” she explained.

Asked why security-sector reform was not raised on this occasion, she said the negotiators should discuss it with their principals first. She also said it would be raised when she met them formally in their capacity as negotiators. This time round they had met representatives of the different political parties.

“It’s their job to discuss the issue. The three parties of the GPA have got a responsibility to deal with those issues, and some of the outstanding issues still have to go to their principals, and ourselves too,” she explained, “we’ll deal with those issues once we’ve had an opportunity to [present] a report to our principal [Jacob Zuma], but also we’ll deal with these issues once we meet with all of them as negotiators.”

She said her team was looking at meeting the negotiators in the next one or two weeks. They are made up of Patrick Chinamasa and Nicholas Goche (ZANU-PF); Tendai Biti and Elton Mangoma (MDC-T); and Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga and Moses Mzila-Ndlovu (Welshman Ncube’s MDC).

Mangoma on Monday also confirmed that the issue of security sector reform had not been raised in their talks. But he said it will be raised at the upcoming meeting.

“We discussed issues that needed to be attended to, but we didn’t discuss the details about how to go about the security sector reform,” he explained. “Our position is there on paper and this required us to meet as a group with the facilitator to be able to discuss not just that, but all the other issues.”

The meeting will take place ahead of a SADC summit next month, at which South African President Zuma is expected to present a progress report, including a road map toward Zimbabwe’s next elections.

Meanwhile, it was reported that the Zimbabwe Media Commission refused to meet the facilitation team while it was in the country last week. Zulu said: “The Media Commission said to us that they needed us to give them enough time, number one; but also they said they needed us to also alert the minister responsible that we are coming and we need to have meetings with them. We don’t have a problem with that if that’s the procedure that we need to agree on.”

By SW radio