JOHANNESBURG – United States (US) President Barack Obama on Friday promised Prime Minister Morgan Tsangira US$73 million humanitarian assistance, underlining that the money would not be chanelled through the cash-strapped Zimbabwean government.

‘‘I have committed US$73 million in assistance to Zimbabwe . . . (the aid) will not be going to the government directly because we continue to be concerned about consolidating democracy, human rights and rule of law, but it will be going directly to the people in Zimbabwe," said Obama in a statement after meeting Tsvangirai.

The money that the US said would go toward fighting HIV/AIDS and promoting good governance in the southern African nation will be channelled through aid agencies. 

The Zimbabwean Premier who formed a unity government with President Robert Mugabe in February was in Washington, part of a three-week trip to America and Europe to try to drum up financial support for the power-sharing government.

Western nations who have long isolated Zimbabwe, accusing Mugabe of trampling on democracy and ruining a once-vibrant economy, are withholding direct financial support to the Harare administration unconvinced Mugabe is genuinely committed to democratic change or to sharing power with his former opposition foes.

"We now have a power-sharing agreement that shows promise," Obama said, with Tsvangirai sitting next to him in the Oval Office and praised the Zimbabwean Premier’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 over 90 percent. 

Obama, who in March extended sanctions against Mugabe and his ZANU PF party functionaries, said that the US was prepared to work with Tsvangirai but would not give money directly to the unity government because of concerns about governance. 

"President Mugabe has not acted 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. 

Tsvangirai is also scheduled to visit France, Britain, Sweden and Belgium.

Once a regional breadbasket, Zimbabwe is in the grip of a severe economic crisis and food shortages that Mugabe blames on poor weather and Western sanctions he says have hampered importation of fertilizers, seed, and other farming inputs.

Critics blame Zimbabwe's troubles on repression and wrong polices by Mugabe such as his land reforms that displaced established white commercial farmers and replaced them with either incompetent or inadequately funded black farmers leading to a massive drop in farm production.

Mugabe has defended the chaotic and often violent farm seizures as necessary to correct a colonial land tenure system that reserved most of the best arable land for whites while blacks were banished to arid and poor lands.

But critics say Mugabe’s cronies – and not ordinary peasants – benefited the most from farm seizures with some of them ending up with as many as six farms each against the government’s stated one-man-one-farm policy. — ZimOnline