The High Court has today ruled that the appointment of Nelson Chamisa as Movement for Democratic Change vice-president and later as acting president and then president was unconstitutional and is therefore null and void.
All the appointments he made, are also null and void.
Chamisa who took over after Morgan Tsvangirai’s death on 14 February last year appointed Morgen Komichi and Welshman Ncube as his deputies, Tendai Biti as vice-chair and Jacob Mafume as party spokesman, among others.
The court said the MDC must therefore hold its extra-ordinary congress to elect a new leader within a month but it must use the structures that existed in 2014.
The MDC and Chamisa have not yet reacted to the decision which is not likely to go well with Chamisa’s supporters. The party has called for an urgent press conference and is likely to respond to the issue.
The MDC and Chamisa were taken to court by disgruntled supporters who felt the party should hold an extraordinary congress first and were against the incorporation of people like Ncube and Biti.
They also argued that Chamisa was flouting the party constitution to prop himself up.
Chamisa had brushed off the court challenge saying his party had “budgeted for machinations by merchants of darkens, by apostles of retrogression and retrogressive acerbic negative politics”.
“We have in-built resilience to deal with such chaos, such false kites that are thrown in order to shift us from the focus,’ he told Newsday last month.
“We are focusing on the ball, our task is to play the ball and not the man, and that’s the tragedy of certain politicians; they mark the man, instead of marking the ball and that somebody wants to go to court is their right, but we have a resolution in the party, that if you have grievances, if you are a party member, peruse and exhaust domestic remedies because we have them in abundance.”
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