'Zanu-PF not budging on poll dates,' says Prof Moyo

THERE will be no consensus court application between Zanu-PF and the MDC formations, calling for a delay in elections, Zanu-PF politburo member Jonathan Moyo has revealed, as the dispute over the elections between the coalition partners continues.

Moyo told SW Radio Africa that Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and MDC President Welshman Ncube presented their arguments to the recent SADC summit in Maputo as part of a coalition with other opposition political parties, calling for an extension of election dates.

He said the MDCs had excluded Zanu-PF when they took their case to SADC.

"You cannot go to SADC alone and you choose the political parties, in this case they chose Mavambo, Zanu Ndonga and Dumiso's (Dabengwa) ZAPU. And the presentations they made are then attached to a report," he said.

"And they attack Zanu-PF inside the summit, they attack the court judgment and they come out celebrating claiming they have humiliated the president in the summit, claiming Chinamasa has given the president wrong advise and when we are here they want to go to the constitutional court and speak with one voice. That is totally unacceptabl!

"The reports that there is a consensus application by the three parties in the inclusive government is a figment of the imagination of someone who is not creative at all and there is no such a thing."

The Tsholotsho MP said Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa had already filed an application on Tuesday and then on Wednesday "he followed on that application by lodging an application for the matter to be held on an urgent basis. On Thursday there was a hearing on the urgency and a determination was made that all the parties cited in the case, including the applicant, should file their papers on Monday and that the case has been set down for a hearing on Wednesday."

Moyo said during the Thursday hearing on the urgency of the matter, Tsvangirai sought to introduce a "letter claiming that the parties in the inclusive government were still seized with the matter and the matter should be withdrawn until the parties agreed on a consensus application."

The MDC formations have drafted an application which they say is a 'consensus' application and which they hoped would replace Chinamasa's application, but Moyo said this was not done with the participation of anyone in Zanu-PF, including Mugabe.

He accused the MDC leaders of "lying" that Mugabe agreed that ZANU-PF will be part of a document that will be given to Chinamasa to resubmit.

"They made the proposal in the form of an alternative application alone. It was delivered to Minister Chinamasa," Moyo added.

"They did not sit with him, and they presented him with a draft application which was treating Chinamasa as the applicant and them as the respondents – therefore creating a situation where they were going to respond to their own application, which is an unacceptable arrangement."

The MDCs accuse Mugabe of illegally using the Presidential Powers Act to by-pass parliament to fast track changes to the Electoral Act and want the amendments taken back to lower house.

They also believe Zanu-PF is now stalling the process until it's too late to take the amendment bill to the House of Assembly, which comes to the end of its five year term this week

But Moyo insisted that the Electoral Amendment Bill will not be sent to parliament, since the president has already dealt with this issue.

"The court found that elections should have been held by the 29th of June and that the calling of those elections had run out," he said.

"And therefore there was no rule of law as regards the electoral process, and that in order to restore the rule of law in connection with the electoral process the president had to issue a proclamation fixing a date for the elections to be held no later than July 31st.

"We cannot have a situation where people now resort to turning government institutions into their instruments for political parties."

The MDC formations accuse Chinamasa of deliberately filing a court application that is designed to fail after he made it clear that Mugabe was happy with the 31st July ruling but that it was Tsvangirai and Ncube who want an extension.

But Moyo defended Chinamasa saying: "It is common cause that President Mugabe is happy about the judgment, why should he lie about that. In order to appease the MDC formations? It is also true that he had complied with it.

"It is also a fact that the MDCs lobbied Zuma, lobbied SADC and Welshman Ncube went there and behaved as if the SADC summit was a court, making legal arguments before people who are neither judges nor lawyers and thinking that he had dazzled them with legalities."