ZIMBABWE — HARARE - A summit of Africa's largest trading block slotted for Victoria Falls in December has been called off because of fears to hand over the chairman to President Robert Mugabe amid political uncertainty in his crisis-torn country.

 

The Common Market for East and Southern Africa (Comesa) summit had been scheduled for December 6 in the scenic Victoria Falls but it has been postponed to the first six months of next year.

 

Kenya, which is the current holder of the rotating COMESA chairmanship, cancelled the meeting, meaning Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki will continue to head the 20-member country organisation.

 

Kibaki was expected to hand over the chairmanship to President Robert Mugabe, but because his presidency is in dispute, Kenya has postponed the summit in the hope that within the next six months, the issue of Mugabe's contested legitimacy would have been ironed out.

 

 

 

 

Kenya, which has not hidden its revulsion at Mugabe's stolen re-election in a sham one-man race in June, has slammed Mugabe for attempting to grab power from the MDC which has the people's mandate from the March general elections.

The cancellation of the COMESA summit, expected to have been attended by twenty heads of State, was a victory for the MDC's diplomatic offensive.

Kenya's Prime Minister Raila Odinga has expressed shock at a SADC resolution that the MDC should join Mugabe as a junior partner.

The cancellation of the summit, where Mugabe was expected to strut around among democratically elected heads of State, is a devastating blow to the octogenarian dictator, who has seen the world successively reject his brutal regime.

Propagandists in Harare were frantically trying to put spin on the whole thing.

Trade minister Obert Mpofu claimed that the summit had been called off to allow more time for the member countries to negotiate the harmonisation of tariffs within the planned customs union, which was agreed at a summit in Kenya last year.

"The consultations ... will go beyond December 6, 2008, which is when the COMESA Customs Union was scheduled to be launched," Mpofu said.

But diplomatic sources said this was a "blue lie."

The summit was expected to finalise steps towards forming the customs union, after the member countries agreed to allow free movement of capital goods with a 10 percent tax on intermediate products and a 25 percent tax for finished goods.

COMESA represents around 400 million people, linking Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

 

 

 

 

JOKE OF THE DAY - This is a true story happened in Kadoma a few months ago.

 

A man was hitch hiking on a very dark night, in the middle of a storm. The night was rolling by and  there was hardly a car on the road.

 

The storm was so strong that he could hardly see his feet in front of him. Suddenly a car came towards him and stopped. Without thinking, he got in and closed the door, just to realise that there was nobody behind the steering wheel.

 

The car moved off slowly. He looked ahead and saw a curve in the road. Scared, he started praying, begging for his life. He was terrified. Just before hitting the curve, a hand appeared through the window and turned the steering wheel.

 

The man, now paralysed with fear, watched how the hand kept appearing everytime they got to a curve. Gathering all his courage, he jumped out and ran to the nearest lights he could see. Wet and in shock, he went into a bar and asked for a Castle.

 

After drinking it, he told everyone of the horrible experience he had just had. Everyone was silent when they realised he was crying. About half an hour later, two men came into the bar and on seeing the terrified man, one of them said to the other, 'Moyo ndizvo, that's the idiot who got into the car when we were pushing!!!!!!

 

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