A meeting called on Saturday by Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to discuss a split threatening to destroy his party ended with a resolution to boycott next month’s senate elections, his spokesperson said.
However, key members of the national executive of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) known to be in favour of participating in the November 26 poll, were absent.
”The executive meeting is over, and one of the resolutions taken was to deploy national executive members into the countryside to start campaigning for a new Constitution and a boycott of the senate,” Tsvangirai’s spokesperson William Bango said.
”It means the MDC is not going into this election.”
Nomination courts are due to sit on Monday to accept candidates for the poll. But Tsvangirai has asked the country’s electoral commission not to accept any MDC candidates.
Disagreements over whether to contest next month’s elections are threatening to tear apart the six-year-old MDC.
A slim majority of the party’s national council voted two weeks ago in favour of participation, but Tsvangirai overruled the decision.
The MDC leader says under Zimbabwe’s current electoral laws there is no hope of a free and fair poll.
But other senior officials say the party, which won just 41 out of the 120 seats contested in general elections in March, cannot afford to concede more ground to Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF).
The crisis in the opposition party took an ugly turn this week when party vice-president Gibson Sibanda accused Tsvangirai of making threats against those officials in favour of participation, and of breaching the party’s Cconstitution by overruling the council’s majority vote.
Sibanda was not at Saturday’s executive meeting, Bango said. He and three other top MDC officials are reported to have been in South Africa this week for a meeting with President Thabo Mbeki. – Sapa-DPA