Zimbabwean police summoned a leader of the country’s main union organisation to answer charges on Thursday that he called for President Robert Mugabe’s overthrow in a May Day speech, the movement said.
While there was no immediate comment from the police, a spokesperson for the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) confirmed secretary general Wellington Chibebe had gone with his lawyer to Harare’s main police station.
”He has been called in connection with utterances he made at this year’s May Day. According to the police the utterances were meant to press for regime change,” the spokesperson, Khumbulani Ndlovu, said.
Chibebe and the ZCTU have been some of the harshest critics of Mugabe and his handling of the economy, which is grappling with the effects of the world’s highest rate of inflation and an unemployment rate of about 80%.
Mugabe has accused the ZCTU of being an appendage to the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change, whose leader Morgan Tsvangirai is a former head of the labour body.
‘Chaotic’
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s Vice-President Joseph Msika has admitted the controversial land-reform programme was chaotic, in a rare criticism by a government official.
”The implementation was chaotic,” Msika said in comments carried by the state-controlled Herald daily on Thursday.
In 2000, President Robert Mugabe’s government launched a programme under which land owned by white people was seized, to loud Western condemnation.
Many Western countries, including former colonial power Britain, said they did not disagree with the principle of redistributing Zimbabwe’s farmland to the landless.
But they disagreed with the manner in which it was done. In many cases, bands of veterans of Zimbabwe’s struggle for independence invaded farms, terrorised farmers and their families, looted property and forced them to flee.
Thirteen white farmers were killed at the height of the takeovers.
Seven years later, less than 300 of more than 4 000 white farmers on land in Zimbabwe still remain.
Mugabe and his ministers usually fiercely defend the controversial farm takeovers.
But in an unusual departure from the official line, Msika on Thursday criticised some of those involved in the programme.
”We did not say chase them [the farmers],” he said, speaking in the eastern district of Nyanga.
The vice-president was comparing the manner in which land reform was implemented to the behaviour of some of those appointed to monitor adherence to price controls in an ongoing government blitz against high prices in Zimbabwe.
”These youngsters, we give them terms of reference, but they do things their own ways,” Msika said.
There have been reports some that some monitors and police have connived with relatives and friends to force shop owners to sell goods, especially valuable electrical wares, at prices way below the reduced prices stipulated by authorities.
Mugabe’s government recently ordered businesses to reduce their prices by 50% in the ailing Southern African country.
Political gimmick
The Zimbabwe government on Thursday dismissed as a political gimmick a pledge of thousands of tonnes of emergency food aid from the United States.
On Tuesday a spokesperson for US President George Bush announced that Washington would be sending more than 47 000 tonnes of food aid to Zimbabwe, which is facing a massive shortfall of the staple maize.
The spokesperson also criticised the government of President Robert Mugabe for what he termed its reckless economic policies.
But on Thursday, Zimbabwe’s Information Minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, said Harare would accept the donation as reparations for the damage the Bush administration had done to the people of Zimbabwe.
”That they are giving us food to last until the next harvest is just a gimmick to support the opposition as far as we are concerned,” Ndlovu was quoted as saying in the Herald.
”This is a measure to soothe themselves of their guilt, he added.
He repeated Mugabe’s accusation against most Western powers — that Washington was trying to turn the people of Zimbabwe against the government.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that more than a third of Zimbabwe’s 12-million people will require emergency food aid by next March.
The agency said in June that more than two million Zimbabweans would be facing serious hunger as of this month. — Sapa-AFP, dpa