MDC ‘not a threat to national stability’

MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said his party would not be cowed from expressing its views on governance issues in Zimbabwe.

Harare - MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai has said his party was not a threat to national stability and would not be cowed by unconstitutional threats and orders from the Zimbabwe Republic Police and the Zimbabwe National Army from expressing its views on governance issues in the country.

Addressing a press conference at his party headquarters in Harare on Wednesday, Tsvangirai said the government needed to take heed of the concerns raised by people who expressed themselves through protests and demonstrations, instead of threatening them with unconstitutional subversion of their will.

“I must also say the MDC is no threat to national stability. So there should be no threat from any quarter, from any institution about crushing the people’s will to express themselves. And this has come from the spokesperson of the police.

“I just want to warn that such an action would be unconstitutional and as far as we are concerned, we are not going to abide by unconstitutional action of the police. We will abide by what the court says and the same applies to national institutions like the army. We believe in the army to protect the people of Zimbabwe and not to threaten the democratic right of the public to organise themselves, to express themselves,” he said.

Tsvangirai said utterances by the Commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, Constantine Chiwenga, that the army came from Zanu-PF and were a stakeholder in that party were contradictory to the country’s constitution which provided for a non-partisan defence force.

He said the government had shown that it was averse in Constitutionalism, hence the delay in the alignment of laws with the Supreme law of the land, adding that a democratic government should be directed by Constitutionalism, which was the application of the rule of law.

“Out of 400 existing Acts of parliament, that require realignment to the new legal dispensation, only a handful have been presented to parliament for consideration, even these have been in most parts faulty in their content and rejected as not being compliant with the new constitution,” he added.

The MDC leader said the basis of any progress and stability was the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary and adherence to the concepts of the new Constitution.

He said his party was confident of winning the elections in 2018, as they had done in the past.

“We have been winning elections; the problem is the mechanisms to transcend from an entrenched dictatorship to a democratic dispensation. The crisis we are facing in this country is a crisis of legitimacy arising out of refusal to observe the will of the people and to use any other nefarious means to subvert that will.”

– African News Agency