Recently released political prisoner Job Sikhala has formed a new political outfit, dumping the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC), a party that he was the national Vice Chairman and Member Of Parliament for.
Sikhala spent 595 days in pre-trail detention on allegations of inciting public violence. The State alleged that he incited CCC activists to cause violence in Nyatsime, after the brutal murder of the CCC activist Moreblessing Ali by Pius Jamba, a ZANU PF supporter.
He was given a wholly suspended two year jail term on condition that he doesn’t commit a similar offense in the next five years.
In his State of the Nation Address (SONA) in Harare on Thursday, the former Zengeza West Member of Parliament pronounced the formation of a new movement, stating that this would come about after a National People’s Democratic Convention.
Sikhala said the new movement would be driven by the citizens.
He added that the Convention would adopt political inclusivity and even non-political players would be part of it.
“We are not here to pronounce the emergence of a political organization but a broad-based mass democratic movement for everyone in advancement of the mass democratic struggle in the fashion of the United Democratic Front (UDF) of the 1980s in the apartheid South Africa,” he said.
The former MDC-99 front man said his movement would put people at the forefront of the struggle, adding that it differs from the former movements in that everyone will be included in the decision making.
“Every struggle waged throughout the world has succeeded when people own it. The masses must own every decisive stage of our struggle,” he said.
Sikhala, who described his former party CCC as a “carcass”, wished his former comrades in the party well as he announced his departured from the party.
“To all those who have returned their democratic right to cling to the CCC carcass, l wish them all the best in their project,” he added.
