KELVIN JAKACHIRA, Recently in the USA
A key member of President Donald Trump’s Republican party has expressed hope that sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by the Washington administration would be lifted soon. Shawn Steel, a member of the influential Republican National Committee, said the new political dispensation in Zimbabwe was giving hope for better cooperation with the US.
“You always have to be optimistic, there is a political transition and my hope is that the State Department is watching this closely,” Steel told Business Times at his offices in Los Angeles, California.
“If they [Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government] allow the press to flourish, they allow political parties to flourish, they allow independent voices to flourish, and allow small businesses to grow, that’s somebody we want to partner with, we want to help, we want to support.”
The Republican National Committee, in which Steel is a key member, provides national leadership for the Republican Party and is responsible for developing and promoting the party’s political platform, as well as coordinating fundraising and election strategy. It is also responsible for organising and running the Republican National Convention.
The hope of an economic turnaround in Zimbabwe was dashed after Trump signed to extend economic sanctions that were imposed on Zimbabwe back in 2001.
On August 8 – nine days after Zimbabwe’s July 30 harmonised elections won by President Mnangagwa and Zanu-PF – Trump signed into law: S. 2779, the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Amendment Act of 2018 which amended the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001. The new Bill laid out US expectations for a free and fair election.
The MDC Alliance headed by Nelson Chamisa has rejected the presidential result despite a Constitutional Court ruling validating the outcome of the poll.
The elections were largely peaceful before and during voting but turned violent after MDC Alliance supporters took to the streets on August 1, forcing businesses to close. Six people were killed during the skirmishes.
The deaths are now the subject of a commission of inquiry set up by President Mnangagwa to establish who was responsible for the killings and the violence.
On Monday, November 11, both Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) commander, General Phillip Valerio Sibanda, and the commander of the National Reaction Force, Brig-Gen Anselem Sanyatwe, denied before the Commission of Inquiry that the deaths were caused by army shooting, insinuating that the MDC Alliance’s militant wing, The Vanguard, or other anti-government forces were responsible.
“We would have been out of our mind to shoot demonstrators while there were international observers and foreign journalists watching; that did not happen.” Gen Sibanda said. “We would have been very foolish as the Defence Forces to give orders to the troops to open fire on civilians with all these people in the country. We would have been out of our minds to give such an order,” he repeated.
Since imposing the sanctions in 2001, the US has insisted that the sanctions are targeted at individuals, but that flies in the face of the truth as several Zimbabwean companies have had their export receipts, amounting to millions of dollars, seized over the years by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control owing to the sanctions.
Zimbabwe’s new finance minister, Professor Mthuli Ncube, is expected to engage Washington on the amended sanctions law, as it has become an impediment to the country’s efforts to unlock international funding.
