By Dorrothy Moyo| The state owned Sunday Mail in a weekend feature has said zanu-pf president Emmerson Mnangagwa has won a coup in France.
The state broadsheet, said Mnangagwa has won “a major diplomatic coup for Zimbabwe using Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame
The story said Kagame took the country’s anti-sanctions lobby to leaders of the world’s most powerful nations that convened for the Group of Seven (G7) summit in France last week.
The article had Mnangagwa painted and quoted all over the place with not a single word of Kagame’s. Everything was according to Mnangagwa.
The G7 is made up of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Japan and Canada. President Kagame attended the G7 summit after receiving a special invitation as the immediate past chairperson of the African Union.
Emmerson Mnangagwa and President Kagame met for bilateral talks on the sidelines of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) summit in Japan.
In an interview with journalists on Friday, Mnangagwa said President Kagame had briefed him that he had “pleaded” with the G7 countries on the need to lift sanctions against Zimbabwe.
“In particular, with President Kagame we were discussing strategies to deal with the question of sanctions. At the last Sadc meeting in Dar es Salaam, Sadc made a resolution that we must together appeal to AU, so that when AU goes to the United Nations, they speak about the removal of sanctions,” said the President.
“Sadc secretariat must also again appeal for the removal of sanctions. But individual African countries such as Kagame’s Rwanda, they are lobbying. They did lobby for Zimbabwe during the G7 meeting. President Kagame attended the G7 meeting and he was able to meet with the G7 leaders and he pleaded with them over removal of sanctions on Zimbabwe.”
Mnangagwa says his counterpart is a worthy ally in Zimbabwe’s fight against the embargo.
“These are the areas we were discussing and the possibilities of success and attitudes of every single leader in G7 and how they look at Zimbabwe.”
Mnangagww said he shares a brotherly bond with President Kagame.
“With my brother Paul Kagame, it is a continuous exchange of views with regards to our respective situations in Africa,” he said.
Mnangagwa told Japanese medi on Friday that Zimbabwe will continue the international fight against sanctions, which are limiting the country’s ability to access credit from international markets.
He said: “ZDERA constrains us. For the past 20 years we cannot access support from the IMF, World Bank, IFIs (international finance institutions). Those Bretton Woods institutions cannot extend any lines of credit to Zimbabwe. So we are surviving through our own domestic means. We are doing our best.
“We cannot bury our heads in the sand and blame the Bretton Woods institutions for not giving us credit.”
It remains to be seen if there is anything to celebrate for Mnangagwa, as Kagame has in recent days publicly humiliated Mnangagwa for failing to convine his own people.