A former senior intelligence officer has quit Zimbabwe’s ruling party over the demolitions campaign that has left hundreds of thousands homeless, saying the governing clique is ”punishing the people” for no reason.
”After the elections when we thought there was going to be sanity, we see this massive move of destroying people’s homes and their means of livelihood,” Pearson Mbalekwa, a former MP and senior member of the ruling Zanu-PF’s central committee, said on Wednesday.
He becomes the first official from Zanu-PF to resign since the government launched the blitz in May, razing shacks, markets and nurseries and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless in winter.
”I found we were turning against and punishing the people we were supposed to represent. I asked myself, ‘What for? What have these people done to deserve this?’ I found myself unable to continue my membership in Zanu-PF.”
A former top-ranking intelligence officer in Zimbabwe’s security police, Mbalekwa said President Robert Mugabe’s government is responsible for the proliferation of slums and makeshift market stalls across Zimbabwe.
”We created the system, allowed things to go the way they were going,” said Mbalekwa, who served in Mugabe’s government in various capacities since independence from Britain in 1980.
”We ignored city by-laws for many years for political patronage.”
Mbalekwa said he is ”watching the situation closely” before deciding on his future.
On Wednesday, officials from the lands ministry went to Mbalekwa’s farm outside the central Zimbabwean town of Gweru and took away a tractor and farming equipment given to him under the government land reforms, Mbalekwa said.
”This is part of a mission to punish me. They are on a mission to destroy me.”
Mugabe has defended the clean-up campaign, referred to as tsunami in street lingo, saying it is necessary to rid the country of squalor and crime.
The government demolitions campaign has left between 200 000 and 1,5-million people homeless, according to the United Nations and the opposition respectively.
Police deny reports of four deaths
Two toddlers died during demolitions at Harare area slums in June and four others were reportedly killed at the Porta Farm settlement, west of the capital, although police have denied that those four deaths occurred.
”The reports that are going around that two women fell off a police or army truck and that two children were run over by a police truck at Porta Farm are totally false,” police Superintendent Oliver Mandipaka told The Herald newspaper.
Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights and international groups such as Amnesty International said two women were killed last week when they fell off trucks ferrying them to a transit camp where thousands of displaced people are living in tents. A four-year-old boy was run over by a truck at the settlement west of Harare, the groups said. The fourth reported death was not confirmed.
Mandipaka said a four-year-old girl was hit by a truck, but said the incident happened the day after police raided the settlement and was unrelated. No other accidents were recorded in the area, he said.
”It is not the intention of the police to cause the loss of life during the clean-up exercise,” he said.
At least six other people are reported to have died since the start of the government’s Operation Murambatsvina — or Drive Out Trash — on May 19. Some were killed by falling rubble and the rest died of disease and exposure when they were left in the open in the winter cold.
The main opposition Movement for Democratic Change says the police blitz is aimed at breaking up its strongholds among the urban poor and diverting attention from the government’s economic failings.
The campaign comes at a time when inflation has topped 144%, unemployment is about 70% and about four million Zimbabweans are in urgent need of food.
Humanitarian workers and opposition leaders estimate up to 1,5-million people have been affected by the demolitions.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has sent an envoy to investigate the humanitarian impact of the campaign. — Sapa-AP, Sapa-AFP