By Diadie Ba

DAKAR, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Efforts to end the crisis in Zimbabwe cannot be left to South African President Thabo Mbeki alone and Africa as a whole must do more to prevent the collapse of the southern state, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said.

Wade called Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who denies foreign accusations that he has abused human rights and wrecked Zimbabwe's once-prosperous economy, a "bad lawyer with a good cause" to argue.

A grouping of southern African nations has mandated South Africa's Mbeki to secure a deal on constitutional reform between Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change ahead of March 2008 presidential and parliamentary polls.

But Wade, who from his small West African country has often sparred with Mbeki in the past over leadership on African issues, said more African heads of state, including himself, should be involved in mediating with Mugabe.

"It's a big mistake to always say that Zimbabwe should be left to Mbeki," the Senegalese president, who like Mugabe is in his 80s, told Reuters in an interview late on Tuesday.

"Mbeki is a man who has a huge amount of goodwill but this is a situation which just one person cannot resolve alone, that much is clear," he said.

Wade's comments appeared to diverge from a recommendation by a leading international think-tank this week which called on the world, including Western powers, to close ranks behind the Mbeki mediation for Zimbabwe.

The Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) said in a report Western sanctions had failed and attacks on Mugabe by London and Washington were counter-productive.

ICG said the Mbeki mediation "offers the only realistic chance to escape a crisis that increasingly threatens to destabilise the region".

But Wade, who has led peace and mediation missions in the past for Madagascar, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau and Liberia and is a strong advocate of continental initiatives, favoured a broader approach involving more than one African head of state.

"I think Africa has not helped Zimbabwe. I'm convinced that we haven't helped President Mugabe," he said.

"SHARE HIS CAUSE"

Zimbabwe, once one of Africa's most prosperous countries, suffers the world's highest inflation, officially 6,592 percent, chronic food and fuel shortages, and 80 percent unemployment.

Mugabe denies destroying the economy with policies like seizing white-owned farms for landless blacks, widely blamed for crippling the agriculture sector. He says the West has sabotaged the Zimbabwe economy in retaliation for farm seizures.

Wade said Mugabe could have done more to canvass African sympathy for his opposition to Zimbabwe's best farming land remaining in the hands of a colonial-era white minority after the country's independence in 1980.

"He could have made us share in his cause. We would have defended him," he said.

Partly echoing Mugabe's criticism of Zimbabwe's former colonial ruler, Wade said Britain had a responsibility in the crisis because it failed to honour a 1979 accord on reforms to end land ownership imbalances between blacks and whites.

Wade said the British government had stopped compensating white farmers under the land redistribution reforms.

"But if African states had intervened, we could have changed things so that Britain continued to compensate the farmers and we could have established a climate of understanding between Mugabe and his opponents. That wasn't done," Wade said.

But he said it was not too late for Africa to get involved.

"It's our own blood down there, our country," he said.

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