THE president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has agreed to take part in talks with Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, amid growing concern in Africa over his government’s slum clearance programme.

The initiative, aimed at pulling Zimbabwe back from the brink of economic and social disaster, has been launched by Olusegun Obasanjo, the Nigerian president.

During last week’s African Union summit in the town of Sirte in Libya, Obasanjo suggested to Mugabe that a respected figure — one of two former presidents from the southern Africa region — could mediate in crisis talks that will probably be held in either Zimbabwe or South Africa.

Describing his difficult negotiations with Mugabe to MPs in London last Wednesday, Obasanjo said the Zimbabwean leader, who is 81, had been reluctant to co-operate at first. “But I persisted and he agreed a facilitation should take place,” he said. Obasanjo said he had already put the same proposal to Tsvangirai during a meeting in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, the previous week.

Tsvangirai hopes the talks will give his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) a share of power with Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF. The opposition leader said “a road map towards legitimacy as a country” was needed to save Zimbabwe.

Mugabe had no choice but to negotiate, claimed Tsvangirai. “He is in a corner. He has no fuel, no currency, no food — the country is really at a halt.”

Mugabe showed further signs of giving ground after international pressure on Friday, when he met Anna Tibaijuka, a United Nations envoy, to discuss his slum clearance programme, known as “Drive Out Filth”.

Since it began on May 19 an estimated 1m of Zimbabwe’s poorest citizens have been forced to leave their shanty dwellings on the edges of cities, often at gunpoint: at least six people have died in the clearances, including women and children.

Mugabe’s government has pledged three trillion Zimbabwean dollars (£191m) to provide 1.2m houses and building plots by 2008, but economists doubt that any such programme will materialise. Inflation in Zimbabwe is running at more than 140%, 1.2m tons of corn from outside the country are needed to ward off mass starvation and petrol is so scarce that it is selling on the black market for the equivalent of £3.50 a litre, far beyond the means of many people.

Mugabe is also facing dissent within Zanu. Last week Pearson Mbalekwa, a member of the party’s powerful central committee, resigned. He described the slum clearances as “callous and inhumane”.

Diplomats close to the negotiations said Obasanjo telephoned the two former regional leaders he has identified as potential mediators last Thursday. The favourite is said to to be Joaquim Chissano, the former president of Mozambique, who stepped down in February and was best man at Mugabe’s wedding to his second wife, Grace, in 1996. He is well regarded both regionally and on the wider international stage.

Obasanjo is under no illusions about the difficulties of reining in Mugabe, diplomats emphasised. “He’s not expecting any immediate breakthrough,” said one.

Zanu documents leaked recently indicate that Mugabe has every intention of extending the party’s rule: they outlined a plan in which Mugabe would retire in 2008, with Joyce Mujuru, the newly appointed vice-president, taking over.

Using his two-thirds majority in parliament, Mugabe would defer presidential elections until 2010, giving Mujuru two years to consolidate power.

The diplomats admitted that a government of national unity involving the MDC was probably too much to hope for. But they said a mediator could help persuade Mugabe to improve Zimbabwe’s human rights record, and to amend its media and civil rights legislation.

Obasanjo and and Tsvangirai were both at pains to point out that any solution to Zimbabwe’s crisis must be achieved through African diplomacy. Tsvangirai said that the talks would also have to be backed by Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, whose policy of quiet diplomacy with Mugabe has exasperated the British government.

“International condemnation is very divisive,” said Tsvangirai. “Gentle persuasion is not achieving results, but it is a very difficult problem.”

A spokesman for the Foreign Office welcomed what he described as an African initiative and confirmed that there was no British input. “For us to come out and say, ‘What a great idea’, would put the kybosh on it straight away,” he said. “If the African Union wants to announce something, then let it do it.”

Mugabe has been in conflict with Britain since Zanu-PF began its campaign of land redistribution in 2000.

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