/ 12 April 2005

MDC to take seats in Parliament

Zimbabwe’s main opposition party said it will take its seats when the country’s new Parliament is inaugurated on Tuesday, despite branding the March 31 parliamentary polls as a massive fraud.

”Our parliamentarians will be there at Parliament today,” said William Bango, spokesperson for Morgan Tsvangirai, who leads the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

At a news conference in Johannesburg on Tuesday, MDC spokesperson Paul Themba Nyathi echoed Bango, saying: ”Forty-one MDC members have been elected. We expect them to carry out this responsibility.”

The MDC maintains that the March 31 polls were rigged by President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF, which took 78 seats of the 120 seats up for election.

Mugabe had earlier said his party would ”run the country in the normal way”, even if the MDC boycotted Parliament.

Meanwhile, Mugabe appointed 30 lawmakers from the ruling party ahead of the inauguration of the new 150-member Parliament, state media said on Tuesday.

Under the Constitution, the president can nominate 30 members in the 150-seat Parliament.

State television and newspapers on Tuesday listed the 30, including serving Cabinet ministers and senior government officials who failed to make it to Parliament in the March 31 ballot.

Among them is former parliament speaker Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was for a long time widely seen as a successor to succeed Mugabe, until a leadership row last year that led to the sacking of former information minister Jonathan Moyo.

The MDC, which has mounted the stiffest challenge to Mugabe’s 25-year grip on power, has condemned the elections as ”a massive fraud”, citing discrepancies between the number of votes cast and the results announced by the national poll body.

The opposition party has said its probe in four provinces showed ”serious and unaccountable gaps between the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission’s official pronouncements on the number of votes cast and final totals accorded to each candidate”. — Sapa-AFP