Opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) deputy leader, Tendai Biti, warned Tuesday that Zimbabwe could easily be engulfed in a deadly conflict on the scale of Rwanda’s 1994 Genocide which claimed more than 900 000 lives.
Speaking during a debate on a report by Parliament’s Media Committee on its community radio legislation benchmarking visit to Kenya, the former Minister of Finance and Economic Development during the Government of National Unity (GNU) said:
Politics, in Zimbabwe, is suffocating because it is politics of intolerance, durawalls and division.
Where you have such corrosive politics Mr. Speaker Sir, it is difficult to come up with a common division. It is politics of hatred, exclusion, intolerance, and regrettably Hon. Speaker Sir, 42 years after Independence, that politics is entrenched.
If you look at the hatred on social media Mr. Speaker Sir, if you look at some of the things that are said in this Parliament – the language of hatred is so entrenched.
We are not very far from Rwanda in 1994. Mr. Speaker Sir, you know what happened in Rwanda in 1994.
Biti said while Kenyans had their divisions, they had unity of purpose and their politics transcend political party boundaries as national goals take precedence over party goals NewZimbabwe’com reports.
Some analysts say the Unity Accord of 1987 and the GNU of 2009 were the closest incidences of when Zimbabwe attempted to prioritise national goals at the expense of party goals.
Some, however, describe the incidents as marriages of convenience necessitated by the ruling ZANU PF’s politics of intolerance.