Story by Oleen Ndori, Foreign Editor
ZIMBABWE’s campaign trail in the Caribbean has ended, with Barbados and the Dominican Republic expressing support for the country’s bid for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. (UNSC).
The campaign saw the President’s Special Envoy, Professor Amon Murwira, engaging Caribbean nations, deepening bilateral relations as Harare seeks to strengthen its partnerships in line with global peace and security efforts.
In Barbados, discussions also centred on enhancing economic partnerships and multilateral cooperation.
“We discussed a number of areas in which we can cooperate. Of course, the Minister mentioned the areas of multilateralism, cooperating at the global level to ensure institutional change and reform at the UN and other multilateral agencies. We also discussed the issue of trade and investment to see how our countries bilaterally can work with each other to pursue agreements, whether full agreements or partial score, any type of cooperation agreement that would allow us to exchange not only people but investment as well, both investment into Zimbabwe but also into Barbados at a bilateral level and then working regionally through CARICOM with the African Union and other institutions and organizations within Africa.
“ We spoke about the catalytic role of Afreximbank and the work that the Prime Minister would have done, Prime Minister Honourable Mayor Motley would have done to get Professor Orama, who is the outgoing President of the Afreximbank and his colleagues to consider the Caribbean as an area for strategic investment.
“That has worked well, I believe the bank is now really up to significant levels of investment across the region including in Barbados and as you know the bank is going to be setting up one of its sub-offices here in Barbados construction will begin sometime during the course of this year,” Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Barbados, Honourable Christopher Sinckler said.
Discussions with the Dominican Republic included peace and security, climate resilience, trade and tourism, as well as collaboration in education, science, and technology.
“We are pleased to receive the Honourable Minister of Zimbabwe. We have had a very open and good discussion on cooperation, and we are in the works to sign an agreement of cooperation for economic cooperation, and we are also already ready to sign the agreement on political consultations.
“We are happy to have you here in this very historic visit to the Dominican Republic, the first time after almost 20 years of diplomatic relations that we have a minister and a special envoy of the president here in the Dominican Republic. We wish you the best in the rest of your time in the Dominican Republic, and we will continue to strengthen bilateral relations and economic relations between our two countries,” Dominican Republic Deputy Minister of Bilateral Foreign Policy, Honourable Francisco Caraballo said.
Elections for the non-permanent seats to the UNSC are slated for June 3.
