Mwonzora staying in Polad

MDC-T leader Douglas Mwonzora, who leads a smaller faction of the opposition MDCs, yesterday said he planned to keep working with President Emmerson Mnangagwa under his Political Actors Dialogue (Polad) platform, but claimed he did not want a unity government.

Nelson Chamisa, who leads the larger MDC Alliance, has dismissed Polad - a grouping of 2018 presidential aspirants - as a Zanu-PF "cheerleaders" club.

"Dialogue is not unity," Mwonzora told journalists at Bulawayo Press Club yesterday despite vowing not to be part of the group soon after taking over the leadership of the MDC-T in December last year.

"Unity is what Joshua Nkomo (late Zapu leader) and company signed in 1987. That is not the process that you are witnessing now. What you are hearing us saying is that we want dialogue. We want to talk about issues in order to resolve them.

"We are not saying Zanu-PF please come here, lets form one party; no, we are we are not doing that. We are yet to be convinced that there is a better and more sustainable method."

He claimed that the MDC-T strategy was predicated on the historical success of dialogue and claimed Chamisa had no strategy.

Mwonzora recalled 41 MDC Alliance legislators from Parliament and 165 councillors and claimed his party was ready for by-elections to replace them.

His MDC-T only got two seats in the 2018 elections, all on proportional representation and all legislators it claims, including Mwonzora himself, were voted on the MDC Alliance ticket.

"I know we are underestimated. We are eager to be tested on the field. We are tired of people who always say we are we going to defeat you. We are ready for by-elections," Mwonzora said.

"What I know is that people have defected from Chamisa to Zanu-PF and there is empirical evidence for that ... So we have a party which is experiencing mass defections to Zapu PF claiming that other parties are Zanu-PF."

Incidentally, about 200 MDC-T supporters in Bulawayo last Saturday defected to the MDC Alliance.