Politics: Voters commended for courage

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BY PAUL THEMBA NYATHI

HARARE - MDC (Mutambara) expresses its gratitude to the people of Zimbabwe for coming out to vote during the just ended rural district council elections. MDC is conscious of the immense economic burden associated with hunger and starvation which the people of Zimbabwe are enduring as a result of a crisis of mis-governance and corruption in the country caused by Zanu (PF) and the Mugabe government.
We are also mindful of the threats of violence, threats of denials of state supplied agricultural inputs and threats of denials of food assistance that the people of Zimbabwe were subjected to by the ruling party during the election campaign. In spite of all these pressures the people of Zimbabwe were still able to come out in numbers to vote for their preferred candidates. For this we salute them for their courage and resilience.
Not withstanding the uneven electoral playing field, which favours the ruling party, MDC (Mutambara) is pleased with the party’s performance in which it won in 45 contested wards. We note the Tsvangirai group won in 35 contested wards. We congratulate them for their efforts and victories. We hope that these results will demonstrate once and for all that we are a definitely not a splinter group with no grassroots support. The truth of the matter is that in this national election we won more contested seats than the Tsvangirai-led MDC.
(According to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission Zanu (PF) garnered 765 wards, while the Tsvangirai-led MDC polled 54 and the Mutambara-led faction won 42.)
We are also pleased with our improved performance in light of the statistics which show that in the 2003 rural district council elections the united MDC only managed to win no more than 15 wards throughout the whole country.
We as the MDC strongly believe that our concern should be to come up with strategies of dislodging the Zanu (PF) regime and rescuing the people of Zimbabwe from hunger and dehumanizing abuses by the regime.
We recognize that there is still a lot of work ahead in removing the corrupt and dictatorial regime of ZANU PF and to that extent we as a party are prepared to go the extra mile in our struggle against the regime. – Nyathi is Director of Elections for the MDC led by Arthur Mutambara