RYAN TRUSCOTT, Harare | Saturday 12.30pm.
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe acknowledged for the first time on Saturday — in the midst of political violence — that his ruling party is facing a major challenge in Zimbabwe’s parliamentary elections next weekend.
“Here in Harare, we have a big fight for all the seats,” he told a sparsely attended rally in the working class suburb of Highfield.
Mugabe lashed out once again at white Zimbabweans, vowing that blacks would regain “total control of our land,” but noted that he had allowed former rebel prime minister Ian Smith “to keep his head.”
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) — a new party which sprang from the trade union movement — is contesting all 120 electorates, despite brutal political attacks throughout the country that have left at least 30 people dead, the vast majority of them opposition supporters. Four of the dead were white farmers.
Nine human rights organisations on Friday accused Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) and the state of mounting a terror campaign to smash the opposition.
“We allow him to keep his head,” he said. “It’s a borrowed head he has therefore.”
The president, who has ruled Zimbabwe with virtually sole power since independence in 1980, noted that Smith had once said: “This man Mugabe has ruined my country.”
Smith, now 81, owns a 200-hectare (500-acre) farm on the high veld in southern Zimbabwe. It is among some 1500 occupied since February by squatters led by veterans of the guerrilla army which fought Smith’s troops in a bloody 14-year-long liberation war after the white settlers declared unilateral independence from Britain in 1965.
The president, who alternated between English and Shona, lambasted Britain once again, saying “Britain” had described those at the forefront of land occupations as “squatters on the white man’s land.”
Mugabe appoints 30 of the 150 members of parliament, which means the opposition must win 76 seats to gain power, while Zanu-PF need win only 46 to ratin its majority. It had 147 seats in the outgoing parliament. — AFP