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| Tendai Biti |
Tendai Biti press statement:
The Parliamentary ruling made on Tuesday, 17 March 2015 by the Senate President, Edna Madzongwe and the Speaker of the House of Assembly, Jacob Mudenda and to purportedly expel 17 members of parliament and four senators marks a sad and tragic day for democracy in Zimbabwe.
It is a heavy blow to democracy and democratic agenda when the MDC Renewal Team is building a new narrative and that narrative is to provide the solution.
It is unprecedented anywhere in the history of democracy. Democracy is a very simple process as the people have a say on the issue of recalling an MP not a political party.The sum total of the people who voted for the MPs in 2013 comes to 102 000 people. The expulsions are therefore undemocratic and not supported by the Constitution.
It is a reflection of naivety, a reflection of surrender by Morgan Tsvangirai as these spaces are going to be very difficult to recover.
Our erstwhile colleagues have now agreed to collude with the ruling party to reverse the gains that the democratic movement has made over the last 15 years.
Our lawyers are in the art of crafting court applications to challenge the ruling. There is no right of recall of an MP in the Constitution.
It is ironic that at a time when they are preaching their message of ‘big tent’ politics, they have seen it fit to cut the nose to spite the face by donating parliamentary seats to Zanu PF at a time when the Zimbabwean democratic opposition movement in Zimbabwe must be making efforts to close ranks and fight the Zanu PF dictatorship. It is a sad reality that they are now more Zanu PF than Zanu PF.
Zimbabwe’s economy is currently experiencing rapid decline and the citizens are suffering with poverty and deprivation on the rise.
The people are suffering and they are looking for a political alternative that gives them hope for a better future.
Zanu PF has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that it does not have a solution to the challenges we are currently facing. The people are looking up to the opposition to offer leadership and yet our colleagues choose to go to bed with Zanu PF to further erode the little democratic space we had occupied in Parliament following the grand electoral theft by Zanu PF in 2013.
While we respectfully differed with Tsvangirai and his colleagues on strategy and principles, we never imagined that they would one day collude with Zanu PF against the people’s democratic project.
The people of Zimbabwe expected that the few MPs from the MDC formations in Parliament would work together to bring sustainable solutions to the country’s challenges and we have no doubt that they are now disillusioned by Tsvangirai’s shenanigans with Zanu PF.
Further, the ruling by the Speaker yesterday is clearly part of a political strategy that has nothing to do with the law as it is unconstitutional. In making his ruling yesterday, the Speaker of the House of Assembly did not follow due process.
On two occasions last year, 8 May and 14 November, Mudenda ruled that there were two centres of power in the MDC-T and that the legitimacy of the party’s leadership had to be determined by a competent court of law.
The question now is what has made Mudenda change his earlier judgments when the courts have not made any ruling on the matter and the circumstances of the matter have not changed?
Regrettable as it is, it is now apparent from Tuesday’s judgment that there is now political incest between Zanu PF and Tsvangirai and his cohorts.
The actions of the Speaker of the House of Assembly are unconstitutional as the party that purports to have written to him does not exist and Mudenda has succeeded to be in the same bed with it.
Meanwhile, as the MDC Renewal Team, we will intensify our radical constitutional and democratic struggle and we assure Zimbabweans that Parliament or no Parliament, we will be executing the people’s democratic project on the streets and other legal platforms.
The MDC Renewal Team is guided by the Mandel resolutions of 26 April 2014. We will continue with the idea of pushing for the alignment of the country’s laws with the Constitution. We will push for genuine electoral reforms. We will push for the agenda of economic transformation. We will depart from the use hate language and impunity.
We will continue with the idea of the grand coalition of democrats, the national convergence. As genuine democrats, we are able to regroup and in 2018, we give the people of Zimbabwe a chance of undoing what Zanu PF has done for the past 35 years because we are in the correct.
In soccer they say the one with the ball is the one who is marked and the MDC Renewal Team is being marked because it is in control of the ball. Zimeye
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