President Robert Mugabe’s spokesman on Sunday blasted the former opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai for shelving cooperation with Mugabe’s ZANU PF, describing the action as “needless excitement” which will not affect operations of Zimbabwe’s unity government.
Presidential spokesman George Charamba said the MDC’s decision to boycott cabinet and council of ministers meetings was ill-advised since the other coalition government partners would still come up with decisions that are binding on the former opposition party.
“The MDC has disengaged from nothing,” Charamba told the state-run Sunday Mail.
Tsvangirai on Friday declared a deadlock in efforts to resolve sticking issues affecting the country’s eight-month-old coalition government and announced that his party was withdrawing from the power-sharing regime until all problems are addressed.
The MDC demands included the full resolution of all outstanding issues and the substantial implementation of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) that led to the formation of the unity government in February.
The Prime Minister warned that if the constitutional crisis escalated his party would call for the holding of free and fair elections to be conducted by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union under United Nations supervision.
SADC and the AU are the guarantors to the GPA which was brokered by former South African president Thabo Mbeki in September last year.
The fresh crisis in Zimbabwe came after a court last week ordered the detention of Roy Bennett, a senior MDC official, and ruled that he should stand trial on terrorism charges.
Tsvangirai said the detention of Bennett showed that Mugabe and ZANU PF regarded the MDC as a junior partner and that the power-sharing administration would collapse if the president continued his unilateral rule.
Source African Press Agency
