President Emmerson Mnangagwa failed to attend the CEO Africa Roundtable in Victoria Falls on Saturday due to other commitments.
The council is made up of leaders of a variety of major Zimbabwean corporations, entrepreneurs, business executives, intellectuals and church leaders.
The CEO Africa Roundtable chairperson Oswell Bimha said that they had bungled the invitation procedure. In an interview with the Daily News, he said:
Look, when you invite the president, traditionally we have just written directly to his office and we have had to host him, but this time around we have been told we were supposed to follow a certain pattern which we accept we should have followed.
He is our number one CEO. There is an acknowledgement around the table that we have not followed the right protocol but we still are going to, after this, go back to our president because it does not make the outcome of this conference less important.
We still need to engage him out of the collective that we would have come up with. So, next year, we will do the right thing, we will do the correct processes.
We want to assure the president whatever bungling up of the process, it is not disrespect. We are not all part of the protocol processes done within these circles but certainly, we expect him to be with us next year.
… We have failed to do the procedure. The procedure is that we are supposed to write to our parent minister, our parent minister then requests the president or through whatever channels at the president’s office.
So, we did write directly to them, and writing directly to them, we did write on time and we are still wanting to be educated on how else we could have done it so that we could be educated on the process but also getting the president to create time on his busy schedule to come.