Eddie Cross's Gukurahundi claims are a distraction Zimbabwe can ill afford

The Zimbabwe Social Democrats condemn in the strongest terms the growing trend by MDC leaders who have already proven to be incompetent and therefore irrelevant to the nation to revive their political ambitious by opening up old political wounds but with no intention of helping the would heal!

"OPPOSTION MDC-T legislator, Eddie Cross, has claimed that the 1980's government-sponsored Gukurahundi pogroms could have killed up to 80,000 people with probably five times that number displaced and driven into exile," said a New Zimbabwe report.

We question the end and purpose of bringing up this subject now? Mr Cross has been MP since 2000 and he was at the very heart of government during the GNU years and he never once brought up this matter.

Zimbabwe is facing a tough and immediate challenge of ending this Mugabe and Zanu PF dictatorship as quickly and peacefully as possible. The danger of Mugabe hanging on to power and dragging this nation into the chaos and madness that has fallen other nations like Egypt and Syria is real and with each passing day the tyrant remains in office more and more windows of opportunity for a quick and peaceful resolution are slammed shut.

If Mr Cross and his MDC friends had not been so corrupt and breathtakingly incompetent and had implemented the democratic reforms during their five years in the GNU then the nation would have been spare this problem of how to remove this Mugabe regime from office. Mugabe was able to blatantly rig the July 2013 because MDC had failed to implement the reforms!

Last week Elton Mangoma was talking of helping victims of Gukurahundi get death certificates and today Eddie Cross is coming up with new revised numbers of Gukurahundi victims designed to shock. These breathtakingly incompetent MDC leaders are opening up these old wounds to bolster their tarnished political careers. They are breathtakingly incompetent and they have proven that beyond all doubt and they are doing so again here by opening old wounds when they do not have meanings to dress the them much less the expertise to remove the lodged shrapnel.  

Gukurahundi is but one of the many evil things this Mugabe dictatorship has inflicted on the nation over the years; there is the looting, political murders of 2008, the vote rigging of last year, etc. None of these problems will ever be meaningful address as long as Mugabe and Zanu PF remain in power.

It was infinitely easier for MDC to have implemented the democratic reforms during the NGU than to do so now. Bringing up issues like Gukurahundi will only serve to draw the attention away from the important task of getting Mugabe and Zanu PF to step down.

We need to focus on the task on hand and not waste time on issues whose resolution is totally dependent on us getting Mugabe out of office. With all the best will in the world nothing much will  ever be accomplished whilst Mugabe and Zanu PF remain in power; let us expend our energy on what is in our power to deliver here and now and not waste it what will remind a pipe dream because we failed to get out priorities right!

This nation has already wasted its golden opportunity to end this Mugabe dictatorship because MDC leaders like Eddie Cross took their eyes off the ball. We cannot afford to waste this next chance because the same breathtakingly incompetent MDC leaders are once again going off at another tangent!

- zimbabwesocialdemocrats@gmail.com