In the 11 months between August 2008 and July of last year, nearly 100,000 Zimbabweans came down with cholera in the first countrywide epidemic of the disease in modern history. Previous outbreaks in Zimbabwe, which have occurred annually since 2003, had affected only pockets of the country. This time, cholera was everywhere. Corpses filled the streets and hospital beds. In some districts early in the crisis, half of those infected died.

It was a tragedy in every way — not least because the worst might have been prevented. Months before the initial outbreak exploded into a full-blown epidemic, Georges Tadonki, who headed the United Nations’ humanitarian office in Zimbabwe at the time, says he warned his superiors of the severe risk, suggesting to the U.N. country director, Agostinho Zacarias, that 30,000 cases or more were possible. But Zacarias stifled that warning, Tadonki claims.

“He forced us to put the figure very low,” Tadonki told Foreign Policy in an exclusive interview. “Because the government did not accept that there was cholera, the United Nations was forced to align with that position.” Both a high-level official from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) who worked on the humanitarian response and an independent analyst, Ed Schenkenberg van Mierop, confirmed that Tadonki had warned of a catastrophic outbreak.

And indeed, a Nov. 19, 2008, U.N. appeal for aid, issued months after the cholera epidemic began, predicted just 2,000 cholera cases. Just two months later, the death toll alone had already reached that number. In all, more than 4,000 people died between August 2008 and July 2009, and roughly 98,600 people had caught the disease. The true figures might be even higher.

“It was very clear that no action was taken” as the outbreak became apparent, Schenkenberg said. “That is what I would call criminal neglect on the part of the U.N.”

Although some facts are in dispute, Tadonki’s story highlights the perils of U.N. engagement in authoritarian states such as Zimbabwe, from the moral choices about engaging with a country in crisis to the pitfalls of navigating “elections” in a place where they are neither free nor fair after three decades of dictatorial rule by Robert Mugabe. In fact, Tadonki says he was at war with his superiors not only about cholera, but also about the United Nations’ preparedness for an election in Zimbabwe that swiftly turned violent.

Tadonki, the former head of the Zimbabwe branch of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), was fired at the height of the cholera crisis in early January 2009 — in part, he says, because of the warnings he raised. He has appealed his termination, and his case will be heard before a U.N. dispute tribunal in Nairobi, Kenya, on Feb. 23. This FP report is based on more than 200 pages of confidential U.N. documents, including emails and investigations; interviews with nearly a dozen U.N. and government officials, NGOs, and independent analysts; and a lengthy telephone interview with Tadonki.

None of Tadonki’s superiors at the United Nations who were contacted for this article, including Zacarias, would comment on the record. One senior U.N. official, who asked for anonymity because no disclosures could be made to support OCHA while litigation is ongoing, said, “We’re going to just have to take it on the chin.” Some U.N. officials contested Tadonki’s allegations, including a former U.N. agency head who said that “the actual size of the cholera outbreak was larger than anyone (including Tadonki) had forecasted.” And some claimed Tadonki’s clash with Zacarias was due to poor performance, which is cited in U.N. internal reports as the reason for his firing, not his efforts to sound the alarm.

Tadonki, a Cameroonian doctorate-holder with a specialty in mapping and a decade-long history with the United Nations, had arrived in Harare on March 25, 2008, at a fraught moment in Zimbabwe’s history. Once hailed as a model African state, the country had been hurtling toward disaster over the past several years, with an inflation rate rising to the billions of percentage points, food shortages pushing up incidences of malnutrition, and thousands of refugees and migrants spilling across the border into neighboring South Africa.

It was also a particularly challenging time for the U.N. mission there, which included a handful of U.N. agencies, in addition to OCHA, that worked hand in hand with international and local NGOs. Mugabe, who denied his country was in crisis, took issue with OCHA, whose mission was to communicate information about the humanitarian situation. The president and his ruling ZANU-PF party were particularly upset, Tadonki says, because of the agency’s participation in a 2005 U.N. report documenting the forced displacement of an estimated 700,000 Zimbabweans at the government’s behest.

Zacarias, the country director at the time, holds a political science doctorate from the London School of Economics and was once a member of FRELIMO, the former guerrilla movement in Mozambique. He arrived in Zimbabwe three years before Tadonki in March 2005, after two previous U.N. posts, one in Angola and later as special advisor on Africa to the secretary-general.

Tadonki, opposition figures, and some NGO officials raised questions about the proximity of Zacarias to Mugabe’s political party in interviews with FP. “He was certainly perceived as someone who was sympathetic to ZANU-PF,” one MDC official told FP. But some U.N. officials said they saw Zacarias as a classic, old-school African diplomat who thought he could achieve more by maintaining good relations and access to the government.

As both humanitarian and country coordinator, Zacarias faced two conflicting mandates: to ensure that humanitarian aid was delivered in a neutral, unpoliticized way, while also working with Mugabe’s regime to coordinate an approach to developing the country. One senior U.N. official summed up the dilemma this way: “The U.N. has to work with the government. Clearly, we work in a lot of countries where the government can make it very challenging. But should we say forget it? Or stay and try to help?… To be the resident coordinator in some of these countries is not an easy task; you have to deal with the consequences of the actions of those regimes, but in a way that those regimes don’t take for granted that you’ll be there to clean up.”

Unlike Zacarias, Tadonki was in Zimbabwe entirely in a humanitarian capacity, and the two men soon clashed. A dozen emails exchanged between Tadonki, Zacarias, members of the U.N. country team at the time, and some local NGO leaders, and later seen by FP, make it clear that their conflict was visible and pronounced.

“While my job as Head of OCHA Zimbabwe is not easy, it seems to me that you have made it the most difficult job on Earth,” a particularly pointed Sept. 18, 2008, email from Tadonki reads. “It is not clear to me what triggered this astonishing, unexpected and unwarranted outburst,” Zacarias responded nine hours later, carefully pushing back against Tadonki’s complaints.

Not long after his March 2008 arrival, Tadonki says, he updated the country’s contingency plan, a document that every country team produces to prepare for crises (released in final form here), to include political risk, a factor that had been excluded before. “The U.N. chief in country had been forcing agencies in Zimbabwe to say that Zimbabwe was on the same footing as Lesotho — telling us that the agriculture is troubling because there is no rain, that the education is failing because of a lack of resources from taxes,” Tadonki recalled. In his eyes, however, the causes were political: Land seizures were rendering agriculture unproductive, and repression was hitting every sector hard. (Zacarias’s annual report for 2008 downplays the government’s role in the humanitarian crisis and doesn’t mention that the Mugabe regime refused to acknowledge the cholera epidemic until December.)

Then, on April 7, 2008, Tadonki sent what’s known as an “early warning assessment” to the head of OCHA, U.N. Undersecretary-General John Holmes. The warning was brutally frank. It declared that Zimbabwe’s U.N. country team was “not prepared to face the consequences of an emergency silently in the making” and cited “hesitations of the U.N. in responding to acts of political violence,” warning that the coming months would see “dire consequences.” Such strong words directed at the country team also represented a direct attack on Zacarias.

Tadonki sent his assessment directly to New York, but tensions escalated in Harare on May 14, 2008, after someone leaked Zacarias a copy of the document. In a meeting of fellow humanitarian workers, Zacarias confronted and admonished him for reporting that the United Nations was unprepared for a calamitous humanitarian situation.

The following week, a joint World Food Program, UNICEF, and OCHA regional mission arrived in Zimbabwe, staying from May 19 to 21. According to a draft of the mission’s report seen by FP, the mission concluded that “the U.N. and NGOs are in a ‘reactive’ mode.” It also recommended that Tadonki’s agency be given more freedom to operate.

By then, however, the election violence was well under way. After the disputed first-round poll on March 29, Mugabe’s government denied the MDC’s claims of victory and doubled down on repression. On June 4, the government banned all humanitarian workers from moving throughout the country in the days before the June 27 runoff vote.

Tadonki started receiving reports of desperation. “I have pictures of people with their hands crushed. In Zimbabwe you vote with your finger — [so government thugs] would say, ‘In June, we will see which finger you use to vote against Mugabe,’” he recalled. State-orchestrated violence left “at least 36 dead; hundreds tortured; thousands beaten; and tens of thousands deprived of food or displaced,” according to Jon Elliott of Human Rights Watch.

“We are responsible for those deaths,” Tadonki said. “If the United Nations had told Mugabe, ‘We know what you are planning,’ we wouldn’t have seen it…. We all sat [in Harare] and knew that in the countryside, 60 percent of Zimbabweans were being killed or raped.” No high-level U.N. statements regarding the election violence or the humanitarian ban were made until June, after both were already under way.

One former agency head said that the whole country team, not just OCHA, was well aware of the coming election violence and prepared for “the worst case scenario [of] the possibility of 250,000 to 300,000 people fleeing the violence by crossing the border to neighboring countries,” he told FP by email. “A regional contingency plan was established to be able to respond in the event this would happen. Mr Tadonki’s scenarios did not exceed these projections.”

On top of the election violence, Zimbabwe had a nascent epidemic on its hands, and the tension between Tadonki and Zacarias continued to build over the summer as the first cholera cases began coming in. Frustrated by his inability to make headway within the U.N. system, Tadonki shared NGO figures on the burgeoning epidemic with the Ministry of Welfare, without the NGOs’ consent, first in June and again in October.

“This led to a crisis of confidence between the NGOs and head of OCHA, of course,” said Schenkenberg, who had come to Zimbabwe in 2008 to investigate the cholera situation. But the affair, according to Schenkenberg, also “gave Zacarias a pretext to try to get rid of [Tadonki].” In a letter dated July 7, 2008, two NGO leaders expressed concern about Tadonki, claiming they were losing confidence in his leadership. Schenkenberg’s office, an organization that represents NGOs worldwide, saw the letter and sent him to Harare to investigate. “OCHA was not the smartest in terms of sharing without consultation, but the real problem was the lack of action on part of [Zacarias],” Schenkenberg said.

Over the summer and into the fall, the cholera epidemic exploded, killing Zimbabweans at an alarming clip. Cholera epidemics in Africa have been known to edge up on 2 to 3 percent mortality rates at their worst. But in Zimbabwe, rates rose well over 5 percent — five times the rate cholera epidemics should yield if they are tackled with simple, readily available treatments, according to international guidelines. Meanwhile, the Mugabe government denied there was even a cholera outbreak until December 2008.

Some former U.N. agency heads from Zimbabwe highlighted Zacarias’s accomplishments as an interlocutor with the government. For example, beginning in January 2008, the government imposed a ban on paying partner organizations in dollars at a time when the Zimbabwean currency was essentially worthless due to the massive hyperinflation. This made it near impossible to procure or to pay distributors of aid. But on Nov. 12, 2008, those restrictions at last ended, thanks to “intense negotiations lead by the UN Resident Coordinator [Zacarias], with support from UNICEF,” one former agency head noted in an email.

Other NGO and U.N. colleagues of Tadonki defend their response, saying that they found ways to work with the government to bring in medical aid. Custodia Mandlhate, a World Health Organization (WHO) representative in Harare, said in an email that the response had been delayed, but that she, Zacarias, and the country head of UNICEF had finally “decided to go and see the minister of health … and convinced him to declare cholera an emergency.”

Schenkenberg, however, remembers it differently. The WHO, he said, which is supposed to lead the health response, “didn’t have its first meeting [to begin coordinating operations] until the first week of December” — after the government had already declared the cholera emergency. Nor had Zacarias pushed the WHO to do so, according to Schenkenberg.

By January 2009, Tadonki was gone. Assistant U.N. Secretary-General Catherine Bragg, who terminated Tadonki’s contract, cited concerns about a poor performance review and relations with donors in his dismissal notice, according to U.N. internal reports. A November 2008 OCHA mission concluded that Tadonki lacked leadership skills and had polarized the OCHA office.

One donor, however, wrote in a Jan. 19, 2009, email to Bragg, “As a donor, I can tell you that it is not the right time to leave a such important office during this time of humanitarian crisis including cholera, without a head. The gap that this may create while you are looking for someone else will be huge…. I can speak for other donors if I say that since the cholera breakout, we have been receiving regular daily and weekly reports from OCHA which have been very useful.” Bragg declined to comment because of the ongoing litigation.

Tadonki’s dismissal case will be heard starting Tuesday in Nairobi.

FP

Sources at Parliament, which is leading constitutional reforms, said a further US$17 million needed to be raised for the second and third phases of the reform process.

The constitutional reform process is in three phases with the first phase set to be completed this week when the all-stakeholders’ conference is held in Harare on Monday and Tuesday. Our sources estimated the final bill for the first phase of the reforms at US$2 million.

The government indicated at the beginning of the process that it would need US$19 million to write a new constitution but also made it clear it would have to scrounge around for the money.

Constitutional Affairs Minister Eric Matinenga conceded last week that the government still needed to raise more funds for the constitutional exercise; the second attempt by Zimbabweans to try to write a governance charter for the country after the first attempt flopped in 2000.

“We are in the process of sourcing for funds and we are raising the money as we go and the fact that not all the money is needed all at once means we will raise the funds as we go on,” Matinenga said.

He did not disclose the figures the government was looking to raise or from where exactly the money would come. However, the minister indicated that the government had approached some donors he did not name for help.

Under the Global Political Agreement (GPA) signed by Zimbabwe’s three main political parties last year and that led to formation of unity government last February the country should have a new and democratic constitution by mid next year.

New elections for president, parliament and local government will be held after the new constitution is promulgated.

But divisions within the parliamentary committee leading the reform process and a lack of a ready source of funding could delay or even totally derail the exercise especially after members of President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU PF party forced postponement of a key stakeholders’ conference to Monday.

ZANU PF members of the committee had even attempted to have the reform postponed indefinitely but faced resistance from MDC legislators.

In demanding postponement of the conference, ZANU PF said there was need to determine who were the stakeholders to send representatives to the key convention and also said logistical matters had to be ironed out before delegates could start travelling from around the country to Harare

ZANU PF has also demanded that the new constitution should be based on a draft constitution secretly authored in 2007 by that party and the two MDC formations on Lake Kariba and known as the Kariba Draft.

Critics say the document leaves untouched the wide-sweeping powers that Mugabe continues to enjoy even after formation of a unity government with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara.

A source at Parliament said there were donors waiting in the wings with funds for constitutional reforms but said they could be dissuaded from bankrolling the exercise by what he described as “ZANU PF’s infuriating antics”.

Madzongwe – a top official in President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU PF party – has controversially acquired Stockdale Farm after muscling out its original owner Peter Etheredge.

Nineteen-year-old Innocent Mbofana on Monday used a 12-ball-double-barrel shoot gun to shoot himself in the head and died on the spot.

Sources from in the south western farming town of Chegutu said Mbofana’s body was taken to Chegutu hospital mortuary a few hours after he committed suicide.

“He had initially run away after the death of the man they accused of stealing oranges in May and he only returned last week. The police officers at the farm tried to detain him but he escaped and went ahead to shot himself,“ said a source who declined to be named.

A mortuary attendant at Chegutu hospital only identified as Ngwenya confirmed receiving Mbofana’s body on Monday afternoon before it was released to the relatives on Wednesday for burial in rural Chakari near Kadoma.

“The postmortem that was done was just external as the gun shot wound was there for everyone to see. The relatives also did not have money for the more expensive autopsy. Eyes popped out of the eyeholes. It seemed as if he had shot himself from under the chin and the bullet came out through the forehead,“ said the mortuary attendant.

No comment could be obtained from the police last night.

The sources said the family only managed to get US$30 from the Senate President in order for them to buy fuel for the truck that was to be used to carry the body for burial.

Violence erupted at Stockdale Farm in April resulting in the death of the unidentified man at the hands of Madzongwe’s farm guards.

A Justice for Agriculture spokesperson alleges that the man was taken to the citrus pack shed where he was tortured for most of the night.

The following morning the man was released by the guards (no police report was made of the theft), and the body was found near the entrance to the farm.

A report was made to Chegutu police and three of Madzongwe’s guards, plus two Stockdale former employees, were picked up by the police. No arrests have so far been made.

Efforts to get a comment from Madzongwe proved fruitless as she was not answering her mobile phone.

Zimbabwe, also grappling with its worst ever economic crisis, has since 2000 when land reforms began, relied on food imports and handouts from international food agencies mainly due to failure by resettled black peasants to maintain production on former white farms.

Poor performance in the mainstay agricultural sector has also had far reaching consequences as hundreds of thousands of people have lost jobs while the manufacturing sector, starved of inputs from the sector, is operating at around 10 percent of capacity.

International donors and Western governments have – on top of other conditions – made it clear that hey would not consider giving aid to President Robert Mugabe’s unity government with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai while farm invasions continue.

Lawyers want a permanent stay of criminal proceedings against Mukoko whose trial for plotting to unseat President Robert Mugabe’s previous administration was scheduled for early next month, on the grounds that she is a complainant in a case of kidnapping and abduction.

Mukoko, a former staffer at the state-owned Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and now director of human rights organisation Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), and some members of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party are charged with attempting to recruit people for military training in neighbouring Botswana to overthrow Mugabe.

Mukoko was abducted from her Norton home by state security agents in December 2008 and held incommunicado at various secret locations where her lawyers say she was tortured.

The proceedings in the Supreme Court follow the granting of an application filed by human rights lawyers early this year seeking a referral of Mukoko’s case to the Supreme Court by a Harare Magistrate.

If convicted she faces the death penalty, in a case that has potential to scuttle Zimbabwe’s unity government between Mugabe and MDC party leader Tsvangirai.

Western governments and international rights groups have been calling for Zimbabwe’s inclusive government to carry out comprehensive political, economic and justice reforms without delay to uphold human rights and the rule of law before they provide financial support and lift sanctions on Mugabe and his inner circle.

He was the Senator for Gweru – Chirumanzu in the Midlands province.

In a statement, the MDC said Senator Kombayi died at his home in Gweru after battling with injuries sustained when Zanu PF operatives in Gweru shot him on March 24, 1990 while he was campaigning against late vice president Simon Muzenda. He was left permanently disabled.

Kombayi was at the time the National Organising Secretary of the Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM) led by Edgar Tekere. One of those convicted of shooting Kombayi, then Gweru CIO chief Elias Kanengoni, was later pardoned by President Mugabe.

“The MDC feels that Hon Kombayi’s contribution to pre and post Zimbabwe is uncontestable and he deserves a natural place of honour in the hearts and minds of all Zimbabweans.

“The MDC mourns with the Kombayi family and the people of Zimbabwe at this time of bereavement,” said the party.

Senator Kombayi was born on 2 November 1938 and is survived by his wife Mavis, six children and several grandchildren.

In a two-hour address at Southwark Cathedral before evensong on Saturday afternoon, the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe will argue that his country has made important progress towards democracy and stability.

He will tell the thousands of Zimbabweans who have fled during Robert Mugabe’s rule that their country needs their skills, youth and vigour to help it move further along the path to recovery.

Mr Tsvangirai, who is on a three-week world tour to boost his country’s standing in the West, will also meet Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling in an effort to secure financial support for Zimbabwe and political support for his party, the Movement for Democratic Change.

Mr Tsvangirai’s host on Saturday, Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark, told The Times: “He is going around the world to try and persuade governments that now they have some power sharing at last, the better way out of this mess for governments is to support the country. They can do this by giving money. He is coming to the cathedral primarily to meet the Zimbabwean people in exile. He is going to say to them, ’You have real skills and abilities, please choose your moment and come home to Zimbabwe to help rebuild your country.”

Dean Slee said many of the asylum seekers were living in difficult circumstances in Britain. He admitted that like many, he feared a “blood bath” when Mugabe loses power. He hoped the southern African spirit would prevail to enable “truth and reconciliation” as happened in South Africa.

Mr Tsvangirai has chosen Southwark Cathedral to deliver his message because the diocese is linked to four of the five Anglican dioceses in Zimbabwe, with the cathedral itself linked to a diocese of its own. Anglicans in Zimbabwe have suffered terrible privations in an episcopal power struggle that has seen worshippers locked out of churches and intimidated and persecuted by the regime.

A former Anglican bishop of Harare, the disgraced Nolbert Kunonga, an ally of Robert Mugabe, attempted to split the church and set up his own province with himself as archbishop, taking funds and property from the legitimate church.

Church doors have now been opened, however, and the new bishop, Sebastian Bakare, who keeps the chains that were used to lock the door of Harare Cathedral in a bag in his office, led Anglicans in Easter celebrations in the building this year for the first time in two years.

An appeal set up by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Dr Rowan Williams and Dr John Sentamu, has raised £300,000 to help the churches provide food and health care for the victims of the nation’s crisis.

At a press conference after their meeting, Prime Minister Reinfeldt said that Zimbabwe had encountered great difficulty and now the most important thing is to improve life of the people in Zimbabwe.

He promised that during Swedish EU presidency, Sweden and the EU will do its best to help Zimbabwe in its transition to democracy and respect of human rights.

“If Zimbabwe can carry out reforms, resume rule of law, give media freedom, have transparency in financial systems and conduct reform in central bank, I believe Prime Minister Tsvangarai is committed to these reforms. And to help this is one of the important tasks during Swedish EU presidency,” said Reinfeldt.

Prime Minister Tsvangarai said that Zimbabwe is indeed entering its transitional period towards democracy and rule of law.

“Over the past ten years, Zimbabwe was treated almost as a paralyzed country. But now Zimbabwe is changing.”

Meanwhile, he urged Sweden and other countries to provide all kinds of support, be it projects or targeted programs while Zimbabwe is carrying various kinds of reforms and making its own efforts.

Being asked about how he can convince the west to help Zimbabwe while President Robert Mugabe is still in position, Tsvangarai said “it is Zimbabwan people who have decided that we need freedom, we need economic development no matter with President Mugabe or not. I don’t want to comment on Mugabe’s past record. But now for the interest of Zimbabwe, we have decided to have a new path, we will work together to make Zimbabwe’s problems solved. Like any country which has traumatic experiences, it is time for compromise, for reconstruction and push Zimbabwe forward. This is the decision of our coalition government.”

After the conference, Prime Minister Tsvangarai will meet Swedish foreign aid minister Gunnila Carlsson to have detailed discussion about development aid.

“We do have the vision and I think we should easily, easily achieve a growth rate of 4.0 percent this year, which is way above the expected African growth rate of 1.9 percent in 2009,” Biti said.

He was speaking at the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, where he discussed challenges to recovering from Zimbabwe’s economic crisis, which has been compounded by a year of political turmoil following failed elections in March 2008.

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, a member of a power-sharing government with long-ruling President Robert Mugabe, is set to hold talks on Friday with US President Barack Obama as part of a world tour to rally for financial assistance to rebuild the country.

According to the International Monetary Fund, Zimbabwe’s economy has been shrinking for years, contracting by 6.1 percent in 2007.

In 2006, a United Nations report pinned Zimbabwe as Africa’s worst economic performer.

The Zimbabwean government is trying to raise 8.5 billion dollars to rebuild the country, as Biti estimates 95 percent of the population is living on under 35 US cents a day.

Biti said between January and April the country collected revenues of 20 million dollars a month against a public expenditure of 100 million dollars a month.

“You have got huge demands, you have got high expectations … you quickly realise you have absolutely no fiscal space to operate.”

Public enterprises were a source of “fiscal drainage” such as flag carrier Air Zimbabwe which is losing 500,000 dollars a week, said Biti.

Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara said the growth in gross domestic product would happen as a result of the low starting point.

“We have destroyed 40 percent of our GDP over the past ten years, so we are coming from down there, so we have to come up,” said Mutambara.

He said the government was moving from ownership of enterprises, urging the private sector to step in as national transport, electricity and steel providers are in a state of collapse.

“We don’t want to own 100 percent of a rat, we would rather own 10 percent of an elephant,” said Mutambara.

Biti said archaic tax regimes and other systems had “fossilised and ossified” the workings of government.

Obama promised USD 73 million in new aid that a White House official said later would go toward fighting HIV-AIDS and promoting good governance in the poverty-stricken southern African nation. Significantly, the money will not go to the government but will be channeled through aid agencies.

The meeting underscored the quandary Obama faces — how to support Tsvangirai’s efforts to rebuild Zimbabwe’s shattered economy without bolstering his rival, President Robert Mugabe. Western states accuse Mugabe of years of misrule and largely shun him.

Tsvangirai, a former labor official and longtime opposition leader, was in Washington as part of a tour of Europe and the United States to rally support for the power-sharing government he formed with Mugabe in February after bitterly disputed elections that saw his supporters beaten and jailed.

“We now have a power-sharing agreement that shows promise,” Obama said, with Tsvangirai sitting next to him in the Oval Office.

He praised Tsvangirai’s efforts to tackle hyperinflation that has devastated the economy and to improve the daily lives of Zimbabweans who face chronic food shortages and an unemployment rate of about 90 percent.

U.S. STILL HAS CONCERNS

Tsvangirai, whose government says it needs $10 billion to rebuild the economy, has been trying to get funding for his cash-strapped administration and to persuade the international community to lift sanctions.

But Obama made clear that while the United States was prepared to work with Tsvangirai, it would not give money directly to the unity government because of concerns about governance.

A State Department official said U.S. humanitarian aid to Zimbabwe totaled $150 million in the 2009 fiscal year. A White House official said the $73 million announced by Obama was new money.

U.S. officials previously voiced frustration about the slow pace of reforms and Tsvangirai acknowledged on Friday that while there had been progress, “there are also problems.”

Obama extended sanctions against Zimbabwe in March, targeting individuals close to Mugabe and some local companies, but he has so far declined to follow in the footsteps of the Bush administration and call for Mugabe to step down.

“President Mugabe has not acted oftentimes in the best interests of the Zimbabwean people and has been resistant to the kinds of democratic changes that need to take place,” Obama said.

Critics accuse Mugabe of repressive one-party rule and international donors say they remain to be convinced that the new unity government is not simply a cover for Mugabe, 85, to extend his nearly three decades in power.

Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change has long accused Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party of using violence to maintain a grip on power, charges it denies. Arrests of MDC activists have strained the new government.

But Tsvangirai told Al Jazeera television in an interview for broadcast on Friday that “there is no evidence that there is a general campaign of intimidation and violence in the country.” Reuters

The dealers said the rates had been stable at between $1 200 and $1
300 against the American greenback since November, when the government
announced tough new exchange control measures.

However, the rates depreciated this week against increased demand from
the country’s energy utilities, the National Oil Company of Zimbabwe and the
Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority.

The two parastatals jointly require more than US$240 million (Z$198
billion) to urgently finance fuel and electricity imports.

Analysts said the Zimbabwe dollar could slip further because of
continuing foreign currency shortages, which have not improved despite the
opening of the tobacco auction floors at the end of April.

Tobacco output has fallen because of drought, input shortages and
instability in the agricultural sector caused by a controversial government
land reform programme.

Farmers have delivered few bales of tobacco to the auction floors
because of the acute shortage of fuel.

Others are still grading their crop after planting late.

Foreign currency dealers said confidence in the local currency had
also been knocked by the failure of Zimbabwe’s main political parties, the
ruling Zanu PF and Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) to commit themselves
to dialogue on the country’s political and economic crises.

Attempts by regional leaders to facilitate the resumption of talks
between the two parties failed, with neither seeming to be willing to climb
down from the tough public stance they have adopted.

“There is nothing on the group suggesting the local currency could
pick up. All we are seeing and getting are negative signals that can’t help
anything,” a Harare analyst said.

Nesbert Tinarwo, chairman of the association that represents bureaux
de change associations that were banned by the government in November, said
the closure of the bureaux had worsened hard cash shortages.

He said forex dealers were no longer able to tap into other sources of
foreign currency, such as cross-border traders and the diplomatic community.

Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa banned bureaux de change in November,
accusing them of contributing to foreign currency leakages.