By Staff Reporter
Finance Minister Tendai Biti on Thursday said Zimbabwe’s economy would grow by 5% next year but warned the prospects could be scuttled if elections planned for 2013 turned violent.
In his 2013 budget speech to parliament Biti said:
“The biggest risk remains a violent and contested election.” A repeat of the bloody presidential run-off election of 2008 would “collapse the nascent foundation we have built over the last three years,” he said.
After MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the March 2008 election the Joint Operations Command (JOC), a grouping of all the state security agencies, responded with the brutal Operation Mavhotera Papi (where did you vote).
Over 500 perceived MDC-T supporters were killed, while tens of thousands were tortured and maimed. The violence forced Tsvangirai to boycott a run-off election that his supporters also felt was engineered by the election commission who withheld results for weeks while allegedly massaging the figures.
