Zimbabwe is facing a humanitarian crisis after a major outbreak of cholera, South Africa’s health minister said on Wednesday, vowing not to turn away anyone who crosses the border for treatment.
”We are facing a humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe. Under no condition will we stop entry of a person that is ill,” Health Minister Barbara Hogan told reporters.
”We can’t look down upon people who are suffering enormously in Zimbabwe.”
Her comments came hours after Zimbabwe’s Deputy Health Minister, Edwin Muguti, said the outbreak was ”under control”.
”The comment on ‘no crisis’ comes from a specific quarter … and is not reflective of the entire political spectrum in Zimbabwe,” said Hogan, who was speaking as South Africa hosted talks aimed at salvaging a power-sharing agreement between Zimbabwe’s ruling party and opposition.
”We need that political settlement just [because of] the scale of the humanitarian disaster that is breaking out in this country,” she added.
The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Tuesday that 8 887 cases of cholera had been reported, with 366 deaths.
Four Zimbabweans have died of cholera in South Africa after crossing over the border to seek treatment in recent days.
Hogan said South Africa was not facing a severe cholera crisis, but said the country was dealing with the disease as a matter of urgency, with nearly 200 cases reported so far.
Confronting Mugabe
Meanwhile, Botswana has urged Zimbabwe’s neighbours to squeeze President Robert Mugabe out of power to end a political and economic crisis.
The call from Botswana’s foreign minister came amid signs that Mugabe’s Zanu-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change would again fail to end deadlock in talks on a power-sharing agreement seen as the best hope of rescuing the country’s ruined economy.
In the toughest language yet from a state in the region, Botswana’s Foreign Minister, Phandu Skelemani, said the 15-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) should confront Mugabe, in power since 1980.
He said Mugabe would not last if regional states closed their borders and completely isolated him.
”If no petrol went in for a week, he can’t last,” Skelemani told the BBC’s HARDtalk programme, broadcast on Wednesday.
The regional body has failed to persuade Mugabe and the MDC to implement the outline power-sharing deal signed in September, which raised hopes that the hardships of millions of Zimbabweans would ease.
The MDC believes talks in South Africa aimed at implementing the deal are close to collapse, a senior MDC source said.
The discussions ”are going nowhere” and the party had lost faith in former South African President Thabo Mbeki as mediator, the source told Reuters.
Negotiators from Mugabe’s Zanu-PF, Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC and a breakaway MDC faction began meeting on Tuesday to try to reach a breakthrough in talks with Mbeki in South Africa on a draft constitutional amendment.
The amendment would allow a new government to be formed under the power-sharing deal with Tsvangirai as prime minister, but the parties are still arguing over the wording and about who should control which ministries.
Skelemani expressed little confidence in mediation, saying SADC should ”own up” and admit it had failed, and that it was time for strong action.
Botswana’s President, Ian Khama, has emerged as one of Mugabe’s harshest critics in Africa. Mugabe’s government has accused Khama of interference and said his call for fresh elections was an ”act of extreme provocation”.
Zambia has also been highly critical of Mugabe.
Meanwhile, in a report issued by his Atlanta-based Carter Centre, former United States president Jimmy Carter accused Mugabe of refusing to share real power with the MDC and said Zimbabwe might become a failed state if he did not change course.
”Now, after almost three decades of governmental corruption, mismanagement and oppression, Zimbabwe has become a basket case, an embarrassment to the region and a focus of international concern and condemnation,” the Nobel laureate said.
”When it is impossible to pay the army and the enormous civil service, the result may be a resort to internecine violence in what could become a failed state, similar to Somalia.”
Carter, former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan and human rights activist Graca Machel, part of a group called the Elders, were barred from entering Zimbabwe last weekend on a humanitarian visit. Mugabe’s government denied them visas, saying the visit was unnecessary. — AFP, Reuters