President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s offensive re-engagement plan has today suffered a major blow after the United Kingdom (UK) pulled off its support for Zimbabwe’s readmission into the Commonwealth bloc over human rights violations.
This comes after the British Parliament’s International Development Committee met today to discuss on the political crisis currently grappling Zimbabwe.
Appearing before the committee, The Minister of State for Africa at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Harriet Baldwin categorically stated that the UK will not be able to aid Zimbabwe’s bid to be readmitted into the Commonwealth.
“Zimbabwe has written a letter to the common wealth secretary as with many other countries, I would to say that the UK is one of the members of the common wealth, clearly, it has to be a unanimous decision by 53 members but as of today the UK will not be able to support that application because we don’t believe that the kind of human rights violations that we have seen from security forces in Zimbabwe is the kind of behavior that we would like to see from members of the common wealth,” Baldwin said.
263Chat could not get a comment from the government as the information minister was attending a routine cabinet session.
The UK’s new position on Zimbabwe will likely leave Mnangagwa with China to turn to for any support further allienating the country from the western world.
Mnangagwa had pledged to employ a different template from his predecessor Robert Mugabe, with his inauguration speech in November 2017 clearly spelling his determined to reach out to the European countries as part of his ‘Zimbabwe is open for business’ mantra.
