BY OUR REPORTER
BEITBRIDGE
Around 1,200 demonstrators gathered at the Beitbridge border post on Saturday, jeering President Robert Mugabe as he celebrated his 84th birthday.
More than 30 police were called into control the crowd, as trucks and cars backed up for two kilometres, waiting to cross the Beitbridge border post between South Africa and Zimbabwe.
The protest, just metres from a customs office that marks the start of the bridge zone, was organised by a number of Zimbabwe exile groups based in Johannesburg, Pretoria and the border town of Musina.
Mugabe, who turned 84 on Thursday, held his party on the Zimbabwe side of the bridge. Food supplies have run short across the country and insiders from Mugabe’s ruling Zanu (PF) said that the border town was chosen so that food and other goods could be ferried to the party from the South African town of Musina, 10 kilometres south of the bridge.
A giant cardboard cake was hauled into place and four men dressed as skeletons jumped out to hoots and cheers from the audience. At first, it seemed the point was to show how Zimbabweans are starving in a country where United Nations agencies estimate that seven in 10 people are malnourished.
Mysterious deaths
However, one-by-one, the bone-men raised signs with the names of former
Mugabe colleagues who have died under mysterious circumstances after clashing with the President, including the late Xanu (PF) youth commander, Border Gezi, and Mugabe’s military advisor, Josiah Tongogara, who was killed in a car crash shortly before independence in 1980.
Tongogara had been popular with the working class and with veterans on both sides of the civil war that raged from 1972 to 1980.
The protestors, clearly enjoying the joke, surged towards the cake and held two of the skeletons on their shoulders while chanting in support of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Tsvangirai’s Treasurer, former MP Roy Bennett who now lives in exile in South Africa, addressed the gathering in the Shona language, calling on people to go back to Zimbabwe to vote in next month’s election.
Shortly before the crowd dispersed, Zimbabwe Revolutionary Youth (ZRY)’s Simon Mudekwa took the microphone and summed up the remarks made by Mr. Bennett.
“We have suffered long and many of our people have died or been tortured by the regime,” he said. “The future will be ours, but only if we fight for it with our votes. That battle starts now and next time we meet, we will do so on the other side of this bridge, home at last in a free Zimbabwe.
Speaking after the meeting, Mudekwa said: “It is hard to tell how many people were there, but we came with 1,000 t-shirts and they are all finished. I think there must be at least two or three hundred who did not get shirts so that makes it a very large crowd,” he said.
The ZRY had brought its supporters in six buses from Johannesburg and other regions.
“Many from Zimbabwe walked over the bridge to come and join us because we had put out the word that there would be a rally here to counter Mugabe’s celebrations that side,” he said
Post published in: News