CCC Has Not Abandoned Sikhala - Mafume
An official from Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, CCC, has said they have not abandoned jailed member Job Sikhala but were trying to avoid making “the situation worse”.
A former MDC Alliance principal, Jacob Ngarivhume, who is the leader of Transform Zimbabwe, was also arrested and sentenced to four years imprisonment.
Ngarivhume was in April 2023 found guilty of inciting public violence; using his X (Twitter) handle to call for the 31st July 2020 nationwide anti-government protests.
Speaking in an interview with Alpha Media Holdings chairman Trevor Ncube on the platform In Conversation with Trevor, Harare mayor Jacob Mafume said CCC leaders were avoiding actions that would land them in trouble. NewsDay quoted Mafume as saying:
We want to avoid the acts of the oppressor becoming an indictment on you. The continued detention of Sikhala and Ngarivhume is not an indictment on us.
It is an indictment on those people that are detaining him and also an indictment on the Judiciary that allows itself to be in a position where it detains somebody on pre-trial incarceration for more than a year.
What we could do to make the situation worse is to go again on unplanned processes that might actually cloud the situation as to who is the problem here.
Mafume, who has been in opposition politics for many years, said they now know how to deal with an oppressive system. He said:
We have gathered a lot of experience now. We still have the same fire, but we now have the benefit or the wisdom of hindsight.
We know what is in the realm of the possible, what to push and also to measure and manage our excitement at any process that we are doing and also to avoid certain dangers not only to ourselves but also to our supporters.
The 2008 violence taught us a different whole new side to what we were facing and how to measure our tactics and what we need to do and how we do it going forward in many ways to avoid harming ourselves and causing harm to supporters who in most cases would be innocent.
More: Pindula News
