Top officials from Zimbabwe’s main opposition held crisis talks on Thursday amid an appeal by its leader to iron out differences over contesting next month’s controversial polls to a new Senate which threatens to split the party.
Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai told reporters that the six-year-old party, which has posed the biggest challenge to President Robert Mugabe’s 25-year-rule, was trying to close ranks on the November 26 polls.
”The management committee of the MDC, taking into consideration the current crisis in the party… and recognising the party’s objective to replace the Mugabe dictatorship, met in Harare today, [Thursday]” he said.
Cracks in the opposition widened on Monday after 26 members defied Tsvangirai’s call to boycott next month’s elections to a new upper house of Parliament, which critics say is aimed at beefing up the ruling party’s stranglehold on the legislature.
Tsvangirai on Thursday said party officials had resolved ”to continue the dialogue with a view to finding an expeditious resolution of the dispute in the party”.
He said MDC management committee also called on members to ”immediately refrain from all forms of threats, intimidation and violence against any official or member of the party related to the dispute over the Senate election”.
Vice-President Gibson Sibanda, who sat next to Tsvangirai at Thursday’s news conference, last week accused him of ”willfully violating the Constitution of the MDC” by disregarding results of a vote on whether to contest the elections.
”The president himself uttered threats and allowed other office bearers to utter threats against a number of office bearers who had opposed his view that the MDC should not participate in the senate elections,” Sibanda said in a statement.
Simmering divisions in the MDC became apparent two weeks ago after party leaders issued contradictory statements over the party’s participation in the senate elections.
Tsvangirai announced a boycott, but hours later party spokesperson Paul Themba Nyathi said the MDC’s supreme decision-making organ had voted to take part in the elections.
The MDC, which won nearly half of the contested parliamentary seats in the 2000 elections, decided to contest parliamentary elections earlier this year despite concerns they would not be fair.
But Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) won 109 out of 150 seats in the Parliament in the March election, which was derided as a farce by the opposition party.
It also gained a crucial two-thirds majority that allowed it to make constitutional changes on its own — and in August pushed through the creation of a Senate. – AFP
