Johannesburg | Monday
ZIMBABWES opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have called on Zimbabweans living in South Africa to help the party end President Robert Mugabe’s 20-year rule.
MDC deputy president Gibson Sibanda said hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans had fled to South Africa because of poverty, hunger and unemployment caused by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Popular Front (ZANU-PF).
He said the MDC would fight for the right of Zimbabweans in South Africa to vote in next year’s presidential election.
“Alas, Mugabe is so vicious and ruthless that he will not allow you to. We say it is your birthright to choose Zimbabwe’s next president,” he said.
Electoral legislation currently prevents Zimbabweans abroad from voting, a move widely seen to favour ZANU-PF.
Referring to the kidnapping and brutal assault of two MDC officials by self-styled war veterans on Saturday, Sibanda said the attackers were not freedom fighters who fought white rule in the 1970s, but common thugs.
MDC parliamentarian Abedinico Bhebhe and local council candidate Joel Sithole suffered severe beatings and were hospitalised for treatment.
They were kidnapped in southwestern Zimbabwe, where a mayoral election is scheduled for late June in the country’s second largest city, Bulawayo.
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe has reacted with fury to criticisms from US Secretary of Sate Collin Powell that Mugabe was undemocratically clinging to power.
The US envoy, who made his scathing attacks while speaking in South Africa last Friday, had also threatened unspecified political and economic pressure against Zimbabwe to force Mugabe into embracing democracy.
“I hope we can put the right kind of pressure on [Mugabe] so that he would yield to the desire of the people to have a free and fair election and that he would bring the war veterans under control and have them stop terrorising communities in Zimbabwe,” Powell had said.
But Zimbabwean government officials retorted that the US Secretary of State was either uninformed or misinformed about the political situation in Zimbabwe, and regarded his remarks as undiplomatic.
“He needs to be informed that the Zimbabwe constitution has no limited terms for the president just like the British system has no limited term for the prime minister,” said Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to South Africa, Simon Moyo. – AFP, Pana
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