Let’s talk, Tsvangirai urges #mugabe

via Let’s talk, Tsvangirai urges Mugabe 25/03/2014 NewZimbabwe

MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai has urged rivals in the ruling Zanu PF party to stop being “arrogant” and reach out to him and his MDC to help save the country’s economy from total collapse.

The former Prime Minister also accused Zanu PF of “rigging” his party out of government as “payment” for saving the country from total economic and political disaster 2008.

The MDC-T insists its participation in government is the only way the country’s delicate economy can be stopped from spiralling completely out of control.

“Zanu PF is arrogant, Zanu PF is violent. Zanu PF thinks that it has won the election but the opposite is true. Arrogance has got its own limit.

“When you can’t pay the civil service, including soldiers and police, then it (is incumbent upon you) to have national responsibility and say how do l resolve that.

Tsvangirai said another negotiated political settlement was the only solution left for the country to remain on its feet. He dared Zanu PF to ignore his advice at its own peril.

Said the MDC-T leader: “We are saying the time has come to have leadership of the national crisis and that leadership comes from Zanu PF; it comes from MDC to once again say let’s put people first.

“But if they continue to be arrogant, what do you expect us to do, to cry?

“We will watch them but l can tell you that is not going to solve the problem and l can tell you they will have to come around and sit down with others to resolve this national crisis (because) it will not go away.”

The MDC-T leader, fresh from resolving his own survival troubles after a group of party stalwarts pushed for his ouster claiming he had also run out of ideas as leader to unseat the Zanu PF government, said he longed for an independent MDC-T government but had to resign himself to the fact that Zanu PF was still in power.

“The solution necessarily is not a GNU because we all know what has happened at the end. Takabetsera Zanu PF when we negotiated the GNU,” he said.

“We stabilised the situation, we revived education, we revived health, we did everything possible that even people in the rural areas can confirm. What happened at the end? Patakaibetsera Zanu PF yakafunga kuti ah chiregai tivarige manje.

“We did not go to sanitise Zanu PF. We went into the GNU to help the people of Zimbabwe. Was that wrong? It was right. Was that strategic? Perhaps at some stage, that strategy must have ensured a free and fair election which was then rigged and subverted.

“I don’t subscribe to another GNU; I subscribe to a process where the people of Zimbabwe, through dialogue can negotiate and agree that the process we are going to embark on is a process of restoring legitimacy in this country.”

The MDC-T leader further denied he had claimed at a weekend rally in Manicaland he had declined the job of Vice President he had been offered by President Mugabe.

Zanu PF on its part, has denied it had become “clueless” in resolving a national crisis that has seen the closure of companies, a development that has offloaded thousands of poor Zimbabweans into massive unemployment.