The MDC Alliance Midlands Province has thrown its weight behind embattled party leader Nelson Chamisa and concurrently dismissed as ‘merely academic’ Tuesday’s shock Supreme Court ruling which called for a fresh Congress that will elect a successor to late party founding president, Morgan Tsvangirai.
In the interim, the court ruled, Thokozani Khupe will take over the reins as party leader and also take control of, not only the political party’s intellectual property, but its fortress the Morgan Richard Tsvangirai House (formerly Harvest House) in central Harare.
But the Midlands provincial leadership contends that Khupe’s court triumph concerns the MDC-T which Tsvangirai left, and not the MDC Alliance which Chamisa now leads.
Before the disputed 2018 harmonised elections controversially won by President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his ruling Zanu PF, various opposition political parties coalesced to form the MDC Alliance with Chamisa as its leader.
“The Midlands Province wants to make it categorically clear without any equivocation or ambiguity that it is solely behind President Chamisa. The constitutional court ruling is therefore merely academic, and inconsequential. The party that was taken to court was MDC-T and not MDC Alliance. The MDCT can therefore have its second Congress if it so wishes, but not the MDC Alliance”, said Dr Takavafira Zhou the party’s provincial publicist in a statement.
Dr Zhou said it was ‘analytically vogue, vacuous and vapid to assume that Chamisa owes Khupe any monies (allocated to the opposition in elections’.
Describing Chamisa as the people’s president and Mnangagwa as the ‘constitutional president’, Dr Zhou said the MDC Alliance leadership question was answered by the party’s elective Congress held in Gweru in May 2019, which overwhelmingly endorsed the 42-year-old.
Following the Supreme Court judgement, Chamisa’s MDC Alliance was dealt a heavy blow after his former blue-eyed boy Morgen Komichi and Douglas Mwonzora unceremoniously dumped him for Khupe.
Zwnews
