Zanu campaigns for vote using violence and threats
BY SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
MASVINGO
A village meeting Insiza North constituency, 120km from Bulawayo, was interrupted by four military looking strangers, three men and a woman driver who introduced themselves as Ms Moyo, Mr Mthombeni, Mr Moyo and Mr Sithole.
The four informed the gathering that they were from the office of the President and the message was unambiguous.
“Mr kraal head, you and your people voted whatever way in the recent March 29 elections, but for the coming presidential run-off election you and all your people vote President Mugabe only. It is now Mugabe’s turn or else the army will take over! It is your children who will go to war to defend our land from the whites, Tony Blair, George Bush, Gordon Brown and Morgan Tsvangirai.”
The villagers were warned that, if they did not vote Mugabe back into power, to gear themselves for yet another brutal and nasty war, likened to the previous war of liberation and the Mugabe-sanctioned Matabele massacre that left more than 20,000 Matabele people dead, maimed, forced into hiding and missing over a period of five years, if they did not vote Mugabe back to power.
The strangers complained bitterly of the open resentment of Mugabe despite all the ploughs, scotch-carts, tractors and knapsacks for crop-spraying that he had handed out.
“Is Mrs Langa not giving you food at the local Grain Marketing Board depot? Then where is the vote for the President who supplies that food?,” they said.
Clara Langa is wife to Andrew Langa, Deputy Minister of Environment and Tourism, and she controls all grain deliveries and distribution at the GMB depot in Filabusi centre. Local people say she has worked with specific instructions to starve off all known opposition elements by denying them the right to buy government subsidised grain unless there is proof of conversion to Mugabe’s party.
But the people have remained adamant for change, with or without Clara Langa’s grain bribery. Â
Little to celebrate on Independence Day
Post published in: News