MDC-T leader Douglas Mwonzora, who leads a smaller faction of the opposition MDCs, yesterday said he planned to keep working with President Emmerson Mnangagwa under his Political Actors Dialogue (Polad) platform, but claimed he did not want a unity government.
Nelson Chamisa, who leads the larger MDC Alliance, has
dismissed Polad — a grouping of 2018 presidential aspirants — as a Zanu PF
“cheerleaders” club.
“Dialogue is not unity,” Mwonzora told journalists at
Bulawayo Press Club yesterday despite vowing not to be part of the group soon
after taking over the leadership of the MDC-T in December last year.
“Unity is what Joshua Nkomo (late Zapu leader) and company
signed in 1987. That is not the process that you are witnessing now. What you
are hearing us saying is that we want dialogue. We want to talk about issues in
order to resolve them.
“We are not saying Zanu PF please come here, lets form one
party; no, we are we are not doing that. We are yet to be convinced that there
is a better and more sustainable method.”
He claimed that the MDC-T strategy was predicated on the
historical success of dialogue and claimed Chamisa had no strategy.
Mwonzora recalled 41 MDC Alliance legislators from
Parliament and 165 councillors and claimed his party was ready for by-elections
to replace them.
His MDC-T only got two seats in the 2018 elections, all on
proportional representation and all legislators it claims, including Mwonzora
himself, were voted on the MDC Alliance ticket.
“I know we are underestimated. We are eager to be tested on
the field. We are tired of people who always say we are we going to defeat you.
We are ready for by-elections,” Mwonzora said.
“What I know is that people have defected from Chamisa to
Zanu PF and there is empirical evidence for that … So we have a party which is
experiencing mass defections to Zapu PF claiming that other parties are Zanu
PF.” Incidentally, about 200 MDC-T supporters in Bulawayo last Saturday
defected to the MDC Alliance. Newsday
0 comments:
Post a Comment