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BLANTYRE - The Southern African Development Community (SADC) will send at least 39 observers to Zimbabwe a month before the presidential elections, the chairman of SADC's parliamentary forum said Wednesday.

"We have been assured by the Zimbabwe government that a formal invitation is coming, and we have set up a team of not less than 39 members who shall observe in the 10 provinces which have about 4,500 poling stations," Sam Mpasu, Malawi's parliamentary speaker who chairs the forum, told AFP.

The observers will be drawn from members of parliament in the 14 members nations, Mpasu said.

The decision to send the observers was reached in Harare after a one-day meeting of the forum last week, Mpasu said.

The team will arrive in Zimbabwe a month before the crucial March 9-10 election, he added.

A similar team will also dispatched to the Lesotho elections in May, he said.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Monday said the SADC was among the groups he had invited to send observers to the polls, where he will battle for his political survival against former labor leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

The invited groups comprise mainly African nations, and explicitly exclude Britain, the former colonial power which has spearheaded criticism of Mugabe's increasingly autocratic rule.

Sources in South Africa, a SADC member, said earlier Wednesday that Pretoria would send its own observers to the election, separate from the SADC team, although Mugabe did not invite South Africa in his statement on Monday.

The only nation specifically invited to send observers was Nigeria.

SADC comprises Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Tanzania, Lesotho, Seychelles, Swaziland, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Nampa-Sapa-AFP

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