The leader of the opposition National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), Professor Lovemore Madhuku has said Job Sikhala, and Godfrey Sithole are victims of their party’s refusal to participate in the national dialogue.
He speaks as Sikhala, a Member of Parliament for Zengeza West and Sithole, the legislator for Chitungwiza North and 13 Nyatsime residents are in jail over the 14 June 2022 violence which erupted during the funeral wake of slain Moreblessing Ali, a Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) activist.
Their party morphed from the MDC Alliance which has since 2019 been refusing to join the Political Actors Dialogue (POLAD) platform initiated by President Emmerson Mnangagwa to find solutions to the country’s socio-economic and political crises.
MDC Alliance has been arguing that the platform was only meant to legitimise Mnangagwa whom they accuse of conniving with the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to manipulate the 2018 presidential election.
Madhuku says the party’s refusal to join POLAD is one of the factors why the detained politicians are not getting bail. Madhuku told Citizens Voice Network:
The remedy there has always been clear. The positions that you have seen, the Nyatsime 16 as you put that out, and the issues you’ve raised about Job Sikhala, I think this could have been resolved by a dialogue process. They’re now victims of their own political party that refuses to dialogue. That refused to be part of POLAD. I think that if there were issues to do with the perception which is strongly coming out that this is political perception, what would stop the party to which they belong from having an audience with the president? The role of the president there is not to interfere with the courts but it would be to engage with the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA)… The NPA is the one who would consent to bail, make arrangements for an early trial and so on. Every political leader ought to know that these issues are political… Job Sikhala, Sithole and Nyatsime people are now victims of the failure by their party to know that Politics is about engagement. Politics is not always about fighting and if they had good leadership in that party they would be out by now. If you make it a political issue, you engage other political players.
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Courts argue that Job Sikhala is being denied bail because he broke the previous bail conditions and at some point, he evaded the police until he was found in the ceiling of a house in Tynwald, Harare.