Source: MDC battles to end Bulawayo rift | The Standard (Local News)
BY NQOBANI NDLOVU
DIVISIONS in MDC’s Bulawayo province are refusing to go away with the party’s leadership deploying its national organising secretary Amos Chibaya to the city to nudge warring parties to close ranks.
All has not been well in Bulawayo following the disputed provincial elective congresses, a situation that has seen warring camps take their fights to the local authority to disrupt council business.
A restructuring exercise of party structures, which began in October last year to replace ward and district structures with polling-based structures has done little or nothing to douse factional flames.
Insiders who attended the last Sunday meeting claimed that the feuding factions were implored to share provincial executive positions to appease those disgruntled members, who were defeated in the elective congress.
MDC Bulawayo provincial spokesperson Swithern Chirowodza professed ignorance about the meeting, adding the claims “were coming from outsiders who want to plant divisions in the party”.
“We are very united as a province,” Chirowodza said.
However, Chibaya, who confirmed the meeting, said the gathering was also used as a platform to unveil the MDC’s 2020 agenda, in particular on the creation of polling-based branch structures.
“I did call a provincial assembly for all party structures where I was also telling them about agenda 2020, which speaks to the introduction of what we call branch supremacy, meaning to say that the branches now have power over all the structures. I unveiled a branch manual for branches to operate,” Chibaya said.
“We have what we call a branch executive that meets twice a month; a branch assembly made of four members, who reside at that particular branch.
“These will be polling-based, and going forward all the events, and party activities will be coordinated from that level so that we also measure our performance and so forth.
“That is the approach we will be taking. In the rural areas, we will be having the same where we want every village to have structures.”
Infighting in the MDC in the city is blamed for the party’s loss of the Cowdray Park local government seat to Zanu PF last year in a by-election, a feat the ruling party has struggled to achieve since the formation of the opposition party in 1999.
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