SIPEPA NKOMO : I REGRET LEAVING THE MDC

Former Water minister Samuel Sipepa Nkomo, who recently resigned from politics, has revealed how he painfully regrets dumping the MDC then led by the late Morgan Tsvangirai for a splinter party led by Tendai Biti.

Nkomo was one of the 21 MPs recalled from Parliament in March 2015 after they formed their own party, MDC Renewal Team, in a move that saw Tsvangirai writing a letter to the august House advising that the legislators had severed their relationship with the country’s main opposition party.

Their expulsion saw by-elections being conducted in the vacant seats.
Speaking to Daily News at his home in Killarney where he announced both his resignation from the Joice Mujuru-led NPP, where he was the vice president and his ultimate retirement from politics, Sipepa Nkomo described his idea to dump the MDC as the worst in his 57-year political career.

Nkomo, a liberation war hero, who was incarcerated for years during his formative years in politics, still views the 2015 incident as the worst.

“The biggest mistake that I did was to leave the MDC with Tendai Biti resulting in our being expelled from Parliament, to me that was the biggest mistake I have ever made throughout my political career,” Nkomo said.

“On other things my feelings always told me that this is the right thing but on this particular one I think that was a big mistake.”

Nkomo even suggested that he regretted being associated with the then Biti-led outfit, which described Tsvangirai as a dictator and called him all sorts of names as the fissures between the two entities reached fever point.

Meanwhile, asked about the reality of theories that, Zanu PF had a tendency of deploying its secret operatives to infiltrate the opposition parties, Nkomo had this to say: “I think its correct, don’t play with this thing called CIO, (Robert) Mugabe created it, that is why at the start of every campaign period, you get a lot of opposition parties being formed, mushrooming and coming in to the playing field.”

He added: “I believe that some of them if not most of them are sponsored by the regime and so infiltration is something that I believe has happened.

“In NPP and MDC there is infiltration, there is no political party that is not infiltrated. This idea I think was copied from Russia. In NPP we could tell that so and so is a CIO,” Nkomo said. Daily News

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