Tsvangirai spokesman responds to attacks
By Lance Guma
21 November 2005

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has described recent personal attacks directed on him by fellow party leaders as consistent with a Zanu PF strategy to demonize him. According to his spokesman William Bango, the Presidents office has no wish to dignify the allegations by responding to them in detail. He described St Mary’s Member of Parliament Job Sikhala’s allegation about Tsvangirai eyeing the Vice-Presidency as nonsense. Sikhala has lost credibility as a politician and anyone who took him seriously does so at their peril, Bango added. He accused Sikhala of deliberately mixing up issues and that there was no link between the St Mary’s legislators mission to see Air Marshal Perence Shiri in 2001 and Tsvangirai meeting South African and Nigerian president’s Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo this year to campaign for the Vice Presidency. Turning to the senate debate, Bango said it was now a sterile issue for the party since it was already busy re-organizing its structures for the February congress. The wards, districts and provinces in the party are already busy putting their leaders in place and come the actual congress all leaders out of touch with their constituencies were set to lose their positions. Responding to reports the pro-senate camp might boycott the congress, Bango said that would be a futile exercise since the Secretary General himself had already set the ball rolling in June this year via a memo from his office on the congress process.