Chaos Start After Chamisa Alleges Assassination Attempts By Zanu PF
Zimbabwe biggest opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change Alliance, believes that the country’s ruling Zanu PF has decided to assassinate MDC-A leader Nelson Chamisa because all its other efforts to destroy his party have failed.
MDC-A officials say Zanu PF thugs attacked Chamisa’s convoy twice on the campaign trail in recent weeks, once firing bullets into his car, one of which missed him by centimetres. And later, it says, a Zanu PF- driven bakkie tried to side-swipe Chamisa’s vehicle into oncoming traffic.
Zanu PF had earlier already orchestrated the eviction of 36 MDC-A representatives from Parliament and the confiscation of its headquarters in Harare and its statutory state party political funding.
But when MDC-A bounced back and Chamisa started to pull large crowds in Zanu PF’s rural strongholds while campaigning for the 2023 general elections, the ruling party took fright and tried to physically eliminate the party’s popular leader, party officials say.
Gift Ostallos Siziba, the party’s deputy spokesperson, told DM168 that on 10 October in the Charumbira area of the southern province of Masvingo, more than 200 Zanu-PF thugs had attacked Chamisa’s convoy as he was on the rural campaign trail, driving to the second meeting of the day with local leaders.
“We thought these were just people raising placards with certain messages: ‘We want jobs’; anti-sanctions rhetoric,” said Siziba, who witnessed the attack.
“And we thought that’s okay, there’s freedom of expression after all, freedom of association and freedom to air their discontent around the leadership of the MDC.
“But we then realised these people were armed with machetes, with axes, carrying rubble, basically stopping the convoy, and then they started to throw stones at the president, breaking the windscreen and the side window where the president was sitting.”
Siziba said the thugs were dressed in civilian clothes and some wore Zanu PF insignia. “But some of them were trained militias because of the level of execution of the attack. And when we left, the police then started to follow the president [Chamisa].”
Chamisa’s security detail quickly managed to escort him out of the ambush. But Chamisa had his narrowest escape the next week, on 19 October, the second day of his rural campaigning in Manicaland Province.
At about 6 pm, as their convoy was entering the provincial capital of Mutare, where they intended to spend the night, bullets were fired at them, Siziba said.
The bullets hit both the car in which Chamisa was travelling and an escort vehicle in which Siziba was travelling. They calculated that one of the bullets had missed Chamisa by “a whisker”.
If the bullet had been fired about a quarter of a second earlier it would have hit him, said Sibiza. It missed him because the car was travelling at such high speed, about 160 to 180km/hr, he said.
“It was clear that it was a trained sniper,” Siziba added, saying that police ballistics experts who inspected the site confirmed this — though unofficially. And then the following week, on 27 October, a bakkie, which Siziba said was being driven by a known Zanu PF youth official, had tried to drive on to the verge on the left side of Chamisa’s vehicle — with the intention of side-swiping his vehicle into the path of an oncoming truck, Siziba and the MDC-A believe. Chamisa’s driver moved to the left to thwart the manoeuvre. MDC-A recorded the incident in a video clip.
Siziba said the MDC-A had gone through the motions of reporting the shooting incident to the police but knew nothing would come of it, as the police were in cahoots with Zanu PF.
Zanu PF has flatly denied the claims of an assassination attempt and government spokesperson Nick Mangwana called the attacks “dramas” stage-managed by the MDC-A to discredit Zanu PF and gain international support.
Last weekend Zanu Pf acting national political commissar Patrick Chinamasa said the ruling party was monitoring all movements made by Nelson Chamisa’s MDC Alliance to make sure it does not receive foreign funding ahead of the 2022 by-elections and the 2023 harmonised elections.
He added that the opposition party was working with foreign security agents to destroy Zanu Pf.
However he stressed that the ruling party was aware of all these machinations.
“We are very aware that the MDC Alliance works closely with the CIA (United States’ Central Intelligence Agency) and M15 (United Kingdom’s secret service) to destroy our country, and we are very much aware of their dealings. They are under surveillance from us,” Chinamasa said.
Source Newsreport