Chamisa demands compensation for MDC Alliance duo

OPPOSITION MDC Alliance leader Nelson Chamisa yesterday demanded that government should compensate party activists Last Maengahama and Tungamirai Madzokere, who clocked eight years at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison for a murder charge which was quashed by the Supreme Court last week.

Maengahama and Madzokere were arrested in Glen View, Harare, in 2011 on a charge of killing a police officer Petros Mutedza.

Chamisa yesterday visited the pair, where he said government should also compensate victims of Gukurahundi massacres and the 2005 Operation Murambatsvina that rendered thousands homeless.

"There is a need for them to be compensated. If it was a normal country, the government should just come and compensate them. If this government can't do that, the MDC Alliance government will compensate and apologise to them.

"We must apologise to the victims and compensate for the victims of Gukurahundi. I apologised in Matabeleland when I went there because that's what leaders do. A lot of people were harmed by Operation Murambatsvina and people's pensions were eroded. A lot of people died in June 2008 and a country with angry people cannot prosper," Chamisa said.

Commenting on the Mbuya Nehanda statue erected in central Harare last month, Chamisa said: "Some said I attacked Mbuya Nehanda. Those who worked for our liberation are our heroes and national heroines. We respect them, but we don't idolise them. We respect them and it ends there, we pray only to God."

He lamented that most youth in the country were turning to drugs.

"We have a condemned generation because of these drugs. The biggest drug is the government that does not respect its people."

He blasted government for demolishing vendors' structures, saying "its demon of destruction must be exorcised".