ANC to circumvent Mbeki

The Sunday Times has established that the ANC National Working Committee (NWC) has asked the party's secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe, to establish contact with Zimbabwe's two main protagonists in an attempt to bring them to the table.

This separate ANC initiative comes as Mbeki's mediation efforts in the Zimbabwean crisis took a severe blow as both the MDC and the ANC this week strongly questioned his impartiality as an "honest" mediator. MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said that his party had decided to dump Mbeki.