Mnangagwa spokesman says there is nothing to celebrate about latest US move on Zimbabwe sanctions

President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s spokesman George Charamba says there is nothing to celebrate about the United States’s latest move on Zimbabwe sanctions.

The United States treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) yesterday announced that it was issuing a final rule to remove the Zimbabwe Sanctions Regulations which had been in force since 2003 but were terminated by President Joe Biden on 4 March this year.

Charamba said there is “nothing to celebrate in a tardy,piecemeal dismantling of an illegality which has made us suffer for over two decades. Sanctions must simply go, in toto. Nothingless will do.”

Although the United States lifted sanctions on most of the individuals and firms that were designated, it imposed new sanctions on 11 individuals, including President Emmerson Mnangagwa, and three entities under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.

Africa Check, a continental fact-checking organisation based in Johannesburg, argued after Biden’s announcement that the United States had not lifted sanctions on Zimbabwe because the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act which, among other things, prevents Zimbabwe from accessing funds from global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is still in place.

It quoted US state department official David Gainer assaying: “Our policy toward Zimbabwe has not changed, but our sanction tools have. We continue to have serious concerns about human rights abuses and corruption. Key individuals … bear responsibility for these actions … With the Global Magnitsky programme, we’ll better be able to promote accountability for persons who engage in that conduct in Zimbabwe.”

The United States has all along claimed that its sanctions are targeted at individuals and not Zimbabwe as a country but the United Nations has refuted this saying the sanctions are affecting the country especially the poor.

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