Mbuso Siso, a member of the self-imposed opposition CCC interim steering committee, which tasked activist Sengezo Tshabangu to recall MPs, senators and councillors, has claimed that the group doesn’t have plans to remove party leader Nelson Chamisa.
Speaking in an interview with The NewsHawks, Siso said the CCC interim steering committee is seeking to correct “many wrongs” within the movement.
He said the recalls have ended and were never intended to trigger a sweeping wave of removals of legitimately elected people’s representatives.
Siso said the recalls were meant to remove MPs, senators and councillors who don’t come from communities they purport to represent and, hence do not represent the legitimate interests of the people.
He insisted that the group behind the recalls is not working in collaboration with ZANU PF but conceded that the plan had been hijacked by some Harare political actors, including those loyal to senior party member Tendai Biti and ZANU PF. Said Siso:
The plan from the beginning was to recall imposed MPs and other representatives who did not originally come from Bulawayo communities.
Local people, those who come from particular localities concerned, should represent local communities.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s in Bulawayo, Harare, Masvingo, Mutare, Gweru, Kwekwe or Chinhoyi.
The principle is that local politics requires local people to lead because they know local issues, the people’s history, grievances, interests, problems and potential solutions.
When you bring people from elsewhere who don’t know the local history, culture and issues, they can’t be useful representatives of the people.
Local politics is about local issues in a national context.
However, Biti has on several occasions denied association with Tshabangu and the recalls. Added Siso:
That’s our motivation, but the process has been hijacked in Harare by Biti’s people and some ZANU PF elements.
It’s no longer what we intended at the start, but there are internal CCC issues which we still need to resolve.
We will keep pushing for those issues to be addressed. We have told Chamisa about them before repeatedly, but they were not dealt with.
We have no intention of removing Chamisa at all, but we want to help him stamp out the problem of impositions.
We are not working with ZANU PF, but if others are now doing that they are doing it in their capacities, not our interim steering committee.
We want a strong opposition to fight for change, not a party of friends and their supporters with imposed candidates.
CCC lost seven of the nine parliamentary seats that it won in the August 2023 harmonised elections in the 09 December by-election to ZANU PF.
This means that ZANU PF now needs only three more seats to attain a two-thirds majority that gives it enough numbers to amend the constitution thereby further eroding the democratic gains brought about by the 2013 constitution.
Reports claim that President Emmerson Mnangagwa is toying with the idea of removing the presidential term limits, currently two terms, that is ten years, to create an “imperial presidency”.
More: Pindula News