OPPOSITION MDC Alliance leader Nelson Chamisa yesterday accused “jittery” Zanu PF and State security agents of hijacking his party’s Citizens Convergence for Change (CCC) project and registering it at the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) under little known politician Varaidzo Musungo.
It is thought that the MDC Alliance had targeted to contest
the 2023 general election as CCC after MDC-T’s Douglas Mwonzora laid claim to
the MDC Alliance name.
The CCC, which has been trending on social media over the
past few weeks as a rallying call for opposition supporters, is the brainchild
of MDC Alliance and former Zanu PF politburo member Jonathan Moyo.
Both Chamisa and Moyo yesterday dismissed Zanu PF’s
attempts to hijack the project as “desperate moves by a party afraid of
elections”.
In a letter to Zec dated September 20, 2021, Musungo’s
party secretary-general Farai Zhou said: “We can confirm that our party’s
president and 2023 presidential candidate is Ms Varaidzo Musungo. Our party
logo (is) as appears at the top and bottom of this letter. In the interests of
better communication, we are sourcing offices in Harare and will advise once we
have these.”
But Moyo, a formidable political schemer whose ideas have
helped Zanu PF before, described the move as an inconsequential Central
Intelligence Organisation (CIO)-driven farce.
“The hullabaloo over the purported registration of the
Citizens Convergence for Change (CCC) is a farce which exposes the bizarre
copycat politics that has gripped the jittery Zanu PF securocrats in the CIO
who are dazed by the infectious power of CCC as rallying call for the unity of
citizens across the political divide,” Moyo said.
“What exposes the farce even more is that political parties
in Zimbabwe are not subject to registration, and hence there’s no law for such
registration and, in any event, Zec is not a registrar of political parties,”
he said.
“For the avoidance of doubt, an idea belongs to whoever
conceptualises it and uses it first and does so in public, in an organised and
documented fashion. Only people from Mars do not know that CCC is the
intellectual property of the MDC Alliance and has been in existence for far
much longer than September 8, 2021 when the Zanu PF and CIO copycats
plagiarised the idea.”
In the run-up to the 2018 general election, Moyo threw his
weight behind Chamisa’s candidacy, and recently offered to help fund the training
of MDC Alliance polling agents on how to guard against vote rigging in the 2023
plebiscite.
MDC Alliance spokesperson Fadzayi Mahere said the party was
not shaken by Zanu PF’s decision to hijack the idea.
“It’s clear that it’s Zanu PF doing this. This is
desperation on the part of Zanu PF. They thought that they had finished us off,
but they have since realised that we have come up with a concept which is
bigger than the MDC in 1999. The wave is bigger than ever in the country. It
has created the biggest momentum ever seen in the country in recent years and
this wave is unstoppable, it has engulfed the whole nation. It’s a great idea
whose time has come and nobody can stop it, just like (the late South African
reggae musician) Lucky Dube said ‘nobody can stop reggae’. Nobody can stop this
wave,” she said.
“We are not shaken, we know that these are shenanigans
being done as a way of trying to divert our focus, but the convergence is a
platform and an idea of building a new consensus and a new alliance by all the
people of Zimbabwe, so wanting to reduce it into a political party is an act of
desperation by the people who are panicking, who are scared of the election,
who are scared of the people and Zimbabwean citizens coming together to demand
real change. Their biggest problem is that they have a candidate who is very
hard to sell.”
Efforts to get comments from Zanu PF were fruitless as its
leadership was still holed up in a politburo meeting, its highest
decision-making organ outside congress. Newsday
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