Tracy Mutinhiri and her family remained in hiding

An armed mob has scuttled Mutinhiri’s projects in her Marondera-Seke constituency and shut her out of party programmes to protest her alleged sympathies with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC. She has said the attack began after the historic re-election of Lovemore Moyo as Speaker in an election that has dented Zanu PF confidence.

Mutinhiri is suspected to be one of two Zanu PF MPs who voted for the MDC candidate instead of the candidate fielded by the party Simon Khaya-Moyo. Now in hiding, spending most of her nights in frightened wakefulness, Mutinhiri’s future in Zanu PF precariously hangs in the balance, and the party was moving to fired her from her ministerial post and take

away her farm.

Her alleged floor-crossing is significant in that she is the Zanu PF Women’s League political commissar who had mistakenly believed that she was party to an organisation where she could vote for whom she liked. Mutinhiri’s story, as she tells it, started with the witch-hunt instituted by the party after the Speaker vote, and ended with threatening phone calls and CIO officials in her province stalking her and the Zanu PF provincial leadership disowning her.

But the real beginning of the horror can be traced back to the time she started speaking strongly against her party’s strong-arm tactics. She lost her cousin last year Innocent Muzuva, an MDC activist, to Zanu PF violence. This week she received a threatening phone call her former parliamentary office assistant, Shepherd Kaserera who warned her that her days were numbered and that if she lived in glass house she must not throw stones.

Accusations that she voted against Mugabe in the Speaker elections has seen her placed under deadly surveillance. Intimidation has become the latest weapon in Mugabe’s war to whip his rebellious legislators, who no longer want him, into line. Mutinhiri’s echoing screams for protection was a warning to all the other Zanu PF dissidents as to what might happen to those who even think of defying the president again.

Repeated efforts to obtain Mutinhiri on her mobile were futile, which continously said she was unavailable. But her sister said: “She is in hiding.” Mutinhiri was quoted in the local Press saying: I am living in fear. I am being accused of having voted wrongly during the election for the Speaker of Parliament last week. My life is in danger.

Zanu PF spokesman Rugare Gumbo said: “She must live with her conscience.” Mutinhiri, a divorcee formerly married to Brigadier General Ambrose Mutinhiri, is just one brave woman in the Zanu PF parliamentary caucus who are being intimidated into backing the party’s “systematic political cleansing of the MDC.”

Beatrice Nyamupinga has also been suspected of voting against her party, and is also said to be under surveillance. Many of the rebellious legislators defying their chief whip are now facing death threats, a sinister parallel to the campaign against the MDC. Furious that so many of “his” people voted against him in the Speaker elections – which he knows very well he could never really win – and incensed by calls such as that last week from the SADC Troika demanding an end to intimidation and violence and arrests of MDC officials, he has unleashed his forces to wreak revenge in the most horrible manner.

It is beleived a lawsuit against the re-election of Speaker is brewing, this time it is being brought by political turncoat Gabriel

Chaibva ostensibly because the confidence of a secret ballot were breached in the vote. Speaking about his party’s crushing defeat to his Central Committee last Friday, Mugabe said the party needed to “police” itself. “Let use not look at this failure as a disaster, after all the seat was never ours in the first place,” a subdued Mugabe said. “It is a fact of deviation in the conduct of our people.

Those who vote as required by their conscience, on the basis of what they believe to be right, if they believe to be right to vote against their party; then they are wrong and should not be members of the party.” Mugabe suggested the Prime Minister was “courting” Zanu PF women as a way of undermining his party.