By Blessings Mashaya
HARARE – Hundreds of MDC supporters flooded Harare’s central business district yesterday demanding an end to President Robert Mugabe’s and Zanu PF’s three-and-a-half decades in power.
The angry demonstrators, some of whom chanted “Mugabe kill us all or leave office”, bemoaned the lack of democratic space and slow pace of electoral reforms in the country.
They also savaged the widespread corruption among ruling party elites, the continued disappearance of journalist-turned democracy activist Itai Dzamara, the ongoing crackdown on vendors, rising poverty and unemployment levels, and the dire economic conditions prevailing in the country.
The determined youths, who defiantly marched to Parliament from the corner of Nelson Mandela Avenue and Chinhoyi Street without notifying the police as demanded by authorities, also warned that their demonstration marked the beginning of more and bigger mass actions.
Wearing a red beret, MDC youth assembly chairperson Happymore Chidziva, popularly known among his peers as Cde Bvondo, also warned that there would be dire consequences if authorities did not allow all Zimbabweans to show dissent and demonstrate peacefully.
“There are more of these demonstrations that are coming. For now, we are saying this is going to happen weekly, but soon we are going to demonstrate on a daily basis.
“We are very happy that our demonstrations are getting bigger. Today, it was a youth thing, but going forward we are going to join hands with everyone who wants to see a better Zimbabwe.
“The current state of our economy is a declaration of war against our people and generation in particular, so with this demonstration, we are saying to Mugabe kill us all or leave office,” the tough-talking Chidziva said, adding that they were preparing a petition which they would hand over to Mugabe soon.
“We are going to have Occupy Africa Unity Square. We will occupy all streets and occupy every place, telling Mugabe to go. It is better to die once than to suffer for a long time.”
He also warned the police and other security agents that they were ready to fight for their rights as enshrined in the country’s Constitution.
“We are not violent and we just want to send our message to Robert Mugabe that enough is enough. We have our own marshals who maintain peace during our demonstrations, so there is no need for us to notify the police.
“It is our democratic right to demonstrate … This is the end game. I want all suffering Zimbabweans to join us in this struggle. Don’t be neutral, we need to end Zanu PF misrule now,” Chidziva said.
MDC Harare youth secretary Denford Ngadziore said they were happy as a province to have held what he called “a successful demonstration”. He also urged youths around the country to confront Mugabe head-on.
Last week, MDC secretary-general Douglas Mwonzora told party supporters at Gudyanga Business Centre in Chimanimani that they would ratchet up mass demonstrations around the country following a brutal police clampdown on MDC supporters last Friday that saw scribes and other activists being jailed in rural Makoni.
In the meantime, two leading rights groups have written to Mugabe demanding a State inquiry into the abduction of democracy activist Dzamara seven months ago.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called on Mugabe’s government to investigate and solve Dzamara’s disappearance which is widely blamed on the State as he was seen as a thorn in the flesh by authorities.
Yesterday’s demonstration by the MDC youths came as a despondent liberation struggle icon, Dumiso Dabengwa, bemoaned the glaring lack of democracy and its benefits in post-independent Zimbabwe — to the extent that he now often wished he was dead and in which event he said he did not want to be buried at the National Heroes Acre.
Speaking to the Daily News in an exclusive interview at the weekend, the revered and softly-spoken war veteran — who walked out of Zanu PF in disgust in 2008 to revive Zapu — said he never once imagined that an independent Zimbabwe would plunge to its current sorry political and economic state.
The former senior Cabinet minister also bemoaned the “untenable” fact that Mugabe and his controversial wife Grace now behaved as if they owned the country, with the active encouragement of what he called “dangerous and self-serving bootlickers”.
This was why he sometimes wished that he had died in place of some “very good comrades” who had long “departed” — as they may have been in a better position to stem the myriad crises that continued to batter the country.
It was also the reason why, in the event of his death, he would rather be buried at his rural home in Ntabazinduna, instead of the National Heroes Acre — a resting place he said was being used by Mugabe and the post-congress Zanu PF to settle personal and political scores “with the dead”.
“I am bitter on the issue of how the heroes’ status is now being adjudicated.
“The granting of hero status was made clear right at the beginning, that it is those people who had performed outstandingly in their contribution to the liberation struggle who would lie there.
“But when you leave out people who contributed so much to the liberation struggle, that boggles the mind,” the disconsolate Dabengwa — who has never been a rabble-rouser and usually shies away from the public spotlight, preferring to work quietly behind the scenes — said. Daily News