'Khupe's #Beatthepot Harare demo still on'

EMBATTLED MDC-T vice president Thokozani Khupe said the women-only #Beatthepot protest against President Robert Mugabe's misrule will take place in Harare in a fortnight, as their party is currently concentrating on the Masvingo and Gweru demonstrations.

This comes as MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai is today expected to lead the party's anti-Mugabe protest in Masvingo.

Khupe told the Daily News that as women, they were worried about the collapse of Zimbabwe's economy.

"Women constitute 52 percent of the Zimbabwean population yet hunger and poverty continues to wear the face of a woman 36 years after independence," she said.

"The current political and economic situation has left women vulnerable and weakened to undertake their duties as care givers to children and as the back-bone of the family institution," she said.

Khupe added "women have got kitchen utensils but don't have food to cook so they will use the utensils to make noise in the street for the government to hear".

"It is in this light that women across the length and breadth of Zimbabwe have decided to say enough is enough, and are now organising themselves to fight the root cause of their hunger and poverty.

The planned Harare #Beatthepot demo will be the second after one held in Bulawayo — Zimbabwe's second largest city — about two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, Tsvangirai's spokesperson, Luke Tamborinyoka, confirmed to the Daily News that the former prime minister — recently diagnosed with colon cancer — "was ready to carry on with the struggle".

"Tsvangirai will definitely be in Masvingo. He himself has said he is actually more worried about the country's political economy, which is in a dire state, rather than his health," Tamborinyoka said.

"As Tsvangirai said, misgovernance and just plain cluelessness at the national level have become a more dangerous cancer, even more dangerous than cancer of the colon," he said, adding that Tsvangirai "is more worried about people who are struggling to get food".

Tsvangirai and the MDC — credited with steadying the country's shaky economy between 2009 and 2013 after agreeing to share power with long-serving Mugabe under a coalition government — have staged three mega demonstrations in Harare, Bulawayo and Mutare over the past three months.