Zimbabwe’s main opposition party staged a protest on Thursday against President Robert Mugabe’s plan to extend his rule by two years to 2010, which critics say will worsen the country’s economic crisis.
Hundreds of provincial and district leaders of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) marched through Zimbabwe’s second city of Bulawayo, witnesses said, marking the first major public protest over Mugabe’s leadership proposal.
”It was a peaceful demonstration by the leadership of the MDC to show the way to supporters in demanding that Mugabe should step down now … We cannot afford another two years with him,” Sipepa Nkomo, an executive in the party told Reuters by telephone from Bulawayo.
Nkomo said the protest lasted 30 minutes before it was dispersed by police, who detained one person. Police were not immediately available for comment.
Mugabe has ruled the Southern African country since independence from Britain in 1980 but critics say his politically driven and nationalist policies have hurt a once-thriving economy and impoverished the majority.
MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said this month his movement would mobilise supporters to block a plan by Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party to extend his tenure to 2010 after his current term ends next year.
The MDC has said it will lead a series of street protests and a party official said Thursday’s protest, which caught police unaware, was part of small demonstrations ”to test the waters”.
The opposition charges that Mugabe has used heavy policing tactics — including a law requiring demonstrators to seek police clearance for any protests — to keep opponents at bay.
Critics accuse Mugabe of ruining Zimbabwe, which was one of Africa’s most promising economies, and say that desperate conditions faced by workers have led to wildcat strikes, including by junior doctors and nurses.
Political analysts say more strikes may be on the cards, with or without the MDC’s leadership, as average workers grow angry over the worsening crisis that has seen inflation rise, unemployment surge and sparked shortages of foreign currency, food and fuel.
Vicious economic war
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s central bank Governor Gideon Gono has called for a four-month freeze on prices and wages in a last-ditch bid to halt the Southern African country’s dizzying economic decline, it emerged on Thursday.
Unveiling a package of measures aiming at capping inflation and encouraging economic recovery, the head of the central bank said Zimbabwe is in the middle of a vicious economic war that can only be won by a united effort from all sectors of society.
”Consultations with President Robert Mugabe, ministers and labour representatives [have] generated unanimity that the month of February 2007 be used to secure a firm social contract for a transitional freeze of all prices, wages, salaries, fees, interest rates, municipal charges and all other forms of tariffs and rates in the economy, to be reviewed after an initial period of four months,” Gono said in the full text of a monetary policy statement published on Thursday.
If approved, the freeze will run from March 1 to June 30.
Zimbabwe is in the throes of its worst-ever economic crisis, with inflation currently running at 1 281,1% and worsening shortages of foreign currency, fuel and desperately needed HIV/Aids drugs. — Reuters, Sapa-dpa