One of Robert Mugabe’s fiercest critics, the Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, has accused Zimbabwe’s opposition of failing to give the strong leadership needed to overthrow the president’s regime.
”Zimbabwe needs leadership of great moral stature. We need an opposition that will lead people to stand up against Mugabe’s dictatorship, not an opposition that waits for people to go out on the streets and then will follow them,” he told the Guardian.
He avoided naming the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), but the target of his criticism was clear.
”It is naive to think that this murderous regime will allow itself to be voted out of office by democratic elections. It is naive to think that people will rise up without leadership,” said the prelate, who is the strongest critic of the Mugabe government in Zimbabwe.
Archbishop Ncube said Zimbabweans had failed to rise up against Mr Mugabe during the recent elections because most people were not prepared for sacrifice.
Mr Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party claimed victory, but the MDC is challenging the result in 30 constituencies.
Despite the strong evidence of massive vote rigging the electoral court will not rule in the opposition’s favour, the archbishop said.
He said: ”The courts have still not ruled on the challenges lodged by the MDC after the 2000 elections. Why would it be any different in 2005?”
The Catholic prelate warned that any mass action against the Mugabe government faced a great risk of violence from government forces.
”It would be worse than Uzbekistan. Everyone knows the Mugabe government has police, army and youth militia who will inflict violence on the people. It is dangerous,” he said.
The archbishop also said that there was growing hunger in Zimbabwe.
”There is no food in the shops in the cities. The shelves are bare. There is no petrol. I went to the rural areas last week and people are suffering. They say they will die without food,” he said, adding that millions of Zimbabweans were at risk of starvation without food relief.
The government admitted the scale of its economic problems yesterday when it devalued the currency, the Zimbabwean dollar, and banned luxury imports in an effort to stem the haemorrhage of hard currency. The governor of the central bank, Gideon Gono, blamed foreign speculators for Zimbabwe’s economic woes.
Economic convulsions have created food shortages, but Archbishop Ncube accused the Mugabe government of refusing food aid to areas that voted for the opposition.
”The government is taking revenge. They are going into villages and refusing to give food to hungry families, old women and families with young children, because they voted for the opposition. This is sinful,” he said.
Mr Mugabe said he would welcome food aid from the UN as long as there were no political strings attached. This is a reversal from his previous stance that Zimbabwe had a bumper harvest and would ”choke” on international food aid.
Archbishop Ncube said Mr Mugabe’s land seizures and economic mismanagement had created the food shortages suffered by the country.
The archbishop was travelling to Scotland, where he is nominated for the Robert Burns humanitarian award, the winner of which will be announced tonight. – Guardian Unlimited Â