Chamisa in a fix over Bulawayo resistance

Chamisa in a fix over Bulawayo resistance
Published: 11 June 2019
MDC president Nelson Chamisa might be in a fix on how to deal with unrelenting pockets of resistance in his party's Bulawayo structures. This comes after the party was once again caught up in violent skirmishes at the provincial offices here over the weekend where the provincial council sought to elect members to represent the province in the national executive.

While no serious injuries were reported, tribal divisions seemed to dominate the scuffle as the two sides wrestled for supremacy in a bid to control the voting process which was being supervised by newly-elected youth assembly chair Obey Sithole.

The on-going conflict has been as a result of provincial congress elections held in the city last month ahead of the national congress where losing candidates argued that the new executive was elected under unfair and un-free conditions.

To push for their demands, the losing provincial members filed a petition to the party's national executive. In its response the national executive only invited the disgruntled members to the national congress in Gweru, where they were unfortunately not allowed to vote.

One of the disgruntled senior members who refused to be named for fear of victimisation told this publication yesterday that the onus was on Chamisa to resolve the matter once and for all. "Generally people from this region are not happy because they are obviously being side-lined. It's painful that our concerns have largely been ignored.

They imposed non-Ndebele speaking people to lead us and we objected to that. "They later invited us to congress in Gweru as voting members but when we got there we were told our names were not on the voters' roll despite that we had letters which indicated that we qualified to vote.

"Now again they want to send names of non-Ndebele speaking members to Harare to represent us as a province. This is why you see people challenging that in an emotional way," the disgruntled member said. MDC national spokesperson Jacob Mafume yesterday said he was not aware of any violence that took place at the Bulawayo office.

"What I know is that as a party we were conducting provincial council elections in the whole country, however we have not received any
reports of violence anywhere," Mafume said. Asked about the disgruntled members, Mafume said there were internal ways of dealing with grievances. "We have our internal ways of dealing with grievances.

We have zero tolerance for violence we will deal with any manifestation violence with a precision of a butcher slicer."
- dailynews
Tags: Chamisa,

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