Tsvangirai MDC demand presidential elections in 2008

By Violet Gonda
17 January 2007

MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said his party will be launching its presidential campaign for the 2008 election despite Robert Mugabe’s attempts to move the polls to 2010. He said the call for elections in 2008 is out of the realisation that the national crisis cannot be extended by another day as the people have had enough. “The party will have to get ready for the Presidential election in 2008.”

Tsvangirai was speaking at a teleconference attended by several journalists in Harare on Wednesday. He said the national executive and national council met and “We resolved we will vote in 2008 but under a new people-driven Constitution. This demand shall be a rallying call for our activities in 2007.”

Many blame Zanu-PF and Mugabe of destroying the country through corruption and mismanagement and the opposition says the regime has completed its project to turn Zimbabwe into a totalitarian state. Tsvangirai said the MDC will work with other stakeholders under the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, to embark on mass action for change.

However it’s reported the opposition leader ducked the issue of the timeframe, when he was challenged by journalists on how he was going to achieve this goal.

Freelance journalist Itai Garande who attended the press conference said: “The responses from the media were generally to say to Mr Tsvangirai - look we understand all the concerns you are raising, we understand as a political party you seem to be seriously considering action to confront the Mugabe regime, but the question now is how you are going to do it?”

Garande said the opposition leader was unclear on this position when he was asked specifically about mass action but responded by saying the struggle belongs to all Zimbabweans. Tsvangirai said all they could do as the opposition was provide leadership and help mobilise the people.

The opposition leader called upon “Zimbabweans across the class, racial and ethnic divide to close ranks and take it upon themselves to save Zimbabwe.”

Meanwhile the Tsvangirai MDC, Mutambara MDC and the USA embassy in Harare, in separate statements, refuted a story that appeared in the Herald newspaper alleging a reunification meeting with US Ambassador Christopher Dell.

The Herald claimed Dell “recently summoned the feuding MDC factions to a meeting at a Harare hotel where he urged them to reunite to be better positioned to unseat Zanu-PF.”

But Paul Engelstad, the Public Affairs Officer at the US Embassy, said the newspaper story is false. He said, “Neither Ambassador Dell, who was not in Harare on that date, nor any other United States of America Embassy official, attended the alleged meeting referred to in the story.”

Nelson Chamisa spokesperson of the Tsvangirai MDC denied such a meeting ever happened and Professor Welshman Ncube Secretary General of the Mutambara MDC also said the story was fictitious. He said: “We hereby place it on record that there is no situation or circumstance under which the MDC, as an independent national political party, would entertain let alone receive any instructions whatsoever from any quarter.”