London played pivotal role in 'African solution' to Zimbabwe's troubles

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Kaizer Nyatsumba: Good news – but Zimbabwe's troubles are not over

Mugabe silent on promise to end farm occupations

As the dust settled on the deal reached in Abuja, the agreement appeared to have meta great many disparate interests.

If it holds even as long as five weeks, it will have saved Zimbabwe from embarrassing calls for sanctions and even suspension from the Commonwealth at next month's heads of government meeting in Brisbane.

It will also have kept at bay an issue, which could have dominated the meeting and divided the Commonwealth.

The agreement may also defuse, if not actually silence, the mounting calls for international sanctions against Zimbabwe.

The timing of the meeting, its venue and choice of participants were crucial to its success. The link with the Commonwealth conference gave the meeting a sense of urgency. The pressure was also on President Robert Mugabe, not just because of the international outcry against the violent occupation of white-owned farms, and the clampdown on media and civil rights in Zimbabwe, but because of the deepening economic crisis.

The country is facing severe food shortages, and possible unrest ­ hardly an favourable climate for Mr Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party in the run-up to next year's elections. The venue for the meeting, the Nigerian capital Abuja, allowed the solution to be called, in the words of the Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, "an African solution for an African problem".

Both the British and Zimbabwean delegations were out of their home territory and ostensibly on an equal footing with the other five delegates, who came from African and non-African countries of the Commonwealth. Nigeria was a key player. The Foreign Minister, Sule Lamido, opened the meeting with tough words about the risk of a "racial war" and the destabilisation of the whole region that set the tone for the next eight hours of talks. Don McKinnon, the Commonwealth secretary general, described the discussions as "very frank, very hard".

Nigeria's tough chairmanship allowed Britain to keep a low profile. This was a deliberate tactic, designed to prevent Mr Mugabe from presenting the dispute over the farm occupation as a conflict between the old colonial power and its one-time colony.

The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, made a point of playing down the prospects for an agreement and Britain's part in the meeting before he set off for Abuja. And afterwards, he said ultra-cautiously: "Ultimately, what we have written on paper is not important ... it depends on how events unfold." This was a veiled warning to the Zimbabwean government that it must halt the forcible occupations and lift the clamp on the media. But it was also a way to duck out of the limelight, leaving the credit elsewhere.

The fingerprints of British diplomacy could be detected all over the agreement, from the definition of the settlement that had to be "within the law and constitution of Zimbabwe", to the definition of the land reform dispute as "a threat to the socio-economic stability" of the region and the continent, and the insistence on observance of "human rights, rule of law, transparency and democratic principles".

It may not be too far-fetched to see the pressure brought to bear by the EU and the US in the past week as orchestrated, at least in part, from London.