2005-10-26,+Tsvangirai+disowns+27,+Peta,+Star

= Tsvangirai disowns 27 who defied his call to boycott polls =

The Star, Johannesburg, October 25, 2005

By Basildon Peta

Zimbabwe's main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has disowned 27 members of his own party, including the chief executive of the banned Daily News, Sam Sipepa Nkomo.

They defied his boycott call and registered to take part in Senate elections next month.

Tsvangirai's spokesperson, William Bango, said the Movement for Democratic Change did not recognise the candidatures of the 27 party members confirmed by the nomination court as candidates last night.

Fifty Senate seats are up for grabs, and Zanu-PF fielded candidates in all the constituencies.

"Mr Tsvangirai does not recognise their candidatures ... They are not MDC candidates. They are own their own ..." said Bango, adding that the 27 had also not been nominated in line with the party's procedures and standards, making their candidatures "illegitimate".

But in a sign of seemingly irreconcilable rifts, MDC spokesperson Paul Themba Nyathi dismissed Tsvangirai's position and insisted that the 27 were official party members and their candidatures were legitimate.

Nyathi said that the decision of the 66-member MDC national executive committee, which voted by a narrow two votes in favour of participating in Senate poll, still stood and Tsvangirai couldn't overrule it.

Tsvangirai had written to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) advising it not to accept any nominations from anyone claiming to represent the MDC as the party was not contesting the polls, but the highly politicised ZEC, staffed with President Robert Mugabe's cronies, ignored Tsvangirai and proceeded to accept the nominations.

Nkomo, the chief executive of the banned Daily News, Zimbabwe's biggest and only independent newspaper until its banning, was one of the most recognisable faces among the MDC candidates who filed nomination papers in Bulawayo.

It is not clear how his decision to plunge himself into politics would affect his paper's bid to get back onto the streets. The Daily News is still fighting in the courts to get a government licence to resume publishing.

The government banned it in September 2003 over its refusal to apply for a licence to operate. It accused the paper of being an opposition mouthpiece. Nyathi said only two out of the MDC's 10 provinces had not put forward candidates for registration.

Analysts said it was difficult to see how the MDC would ever recover from its current quagmire to pose a serious threat to Zanu-PF again.

"The party now needs a thorough restructuring. It cannot proceed and survive in this chaos that it has created for itself," said civic leader Lovemore Madhuku.

From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=129&fArticleId=2965021