Zimbabwe’s main opposition is to decide this week whether it will boycott elections to a newly created senate to be held later this year, a spokesman said on Tuesday.
But the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which currently holds 41 seats in the 150-seat Parliament, has already dismissed the upper house as a distraction from Zimbabwe’s mounting economic and political troubles.
”This is a crucial decision. The national executive will meet on Thursday or Friday and they will vote on whether or not the party is contesting,” said William Bango, spokesperson for MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
The 66-member upper house of Parliament will comprise 10 traditional chiefs, 50 elected senators and six appointed by President Robert Mugabe and was created under a constitutional amendment passed by Parliament two weeks ago and signed by the Zimbabwean leader.
Tsvangirai said in a recent newspaper interview that the senatorial elections were ”not a priority for the MDC”.
”Our priority as MDC is to solve the present national crisis. It does not make sense to endorse the establishment of a senate when the majority of the ordinary people are clamouring for food,” Tsvangirai was quoted as telling the weekly Financial Gazette.
”The MDC was not formed to put people in the legislative house as an end, but to resist tyranny. We can’t be seen to be endorsing tyranny by taking part in these senatorial elections which are clearly not a priority to the party,” Tsvangirai said.
Created in late 1999, the MDC has posed the biggest challenge to date to Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) party, in power since independence in 1980.
Following a divisive debate earlier this year over whether to take part in the March parliamentary elections, the MDC decided to run candidates in the polls even as it dismissed the conditions for holding the vote as neither free nor fair.
Mugabe’s Zanu-PF won 78 seats in the parliamentary vote that the MDC slammed as a ”sham” and has since asked the electoral court to strike down the results in a number of constituencies. – Sapa-AFP