The MDC Senator for Khumalo,Sen.David Coltart has described as a non starter,ZANU PF’s reported offer of third Vice president post to MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai in an SADC/AU initiated all-inclusive government.

“The general consensus that I’ve gleaned is that he will be offered a substantive post. A third vice president wouldn’t provide him with any power and simply is a non-starter.’ he told ABC’s The World Today program last night.

Coltart further said it could be true that ZANU PF negotiators could have been instructed by Mugabe to negotiate around the Vice Presidency and nothing more. That stance reported stalled talks on Monday.

“They may have put that offer even before the talks started. But I think that Zanu-PF itself would know that that is simply a non-starter.”

Coltart was the only MDC(Mutambara) candidate who won a seat in the political volatile Bulawayo Province and is also MDC’s Secretary for Legal Affairs, he is in Australia this week as a guest of the Centre for Independent Studies.

Coltart also said the current negotiations are different from the 1987 talks that led to the swallowing up of the opposition PF ZAPU.

“We can’t trust Robert Mugabe at all. He has always had a belief in a de facto one party state. He is at his core a Marxist Leninist. And so he does not come to these negotiations with clean hands; and he does not come in good faith.

”But let me stress this: that the fundamental differences between now and 1987; in 1987 Robert Mugabe was in charge of a country that had a reasonably strong economy, he had the backing of pretty much the entire world and so he was in a much stronger negotiating position. Now it’s completely different. Robert Mugabe is alienated, is isolated, even in the region, inflation is out of control, there’s a lot of disaffection within the military and the police and the civil service.

”And to that extent he is the weaker party and he we will have to reach an agreement soon because if he doesn’t there’s the real danger that events will spin totally out of control and that he may even lose power through the military taking things over themselves. ” said Coltart.

Meanwhile South Africa’s ANC head Jacob Zuma took a veiled swipe at ZANU PF ’s hard line stance which forced the talks to hit an impasse on Monday.
“The leadership should realise that negotiations are a matter of give-and-take and of compromise,” Zuma told reporters from Maputo.