New Era: All three political parties in the inclusive government have at various stages expressed their dissatisfaction with the continued existence of this coalition government, yet your partners do not seem to want to go to the elections to enable the creation of a new government. In your view what could be the cause of this contradiction on the part of the MDC formations?
Mugabe: Well, it’s just that they are afraid of elections. Many of their members were never elected before this. They were rejected in 2008 and they are riding on this, it’s a free ride on a chariot, that national chariot that they have been enjoying.
You know when you are enjoying free service, there is delivery of lovely goods as you travel on the chariot, you want to go on and on, on and on and that’s cheating the people. You can’t cheat the people and where is your practice of democracy? And we are saying, well, you people say you believe in democracy, let’s go for elections so that you can be properly elected.
No, no, no they are giving all kinds of reasons. And anyway, doomsday is coming for them on the 29th of June, how many days have we to go? It’s on Saturday (today) …. and then the life of Parliament comes to an end and this Parliament dies and they die politically also.
Those of them who are MPs, you see, all MPs cease to be MPs and we can’t continue without a parliament, but some of them say we go on and on. Ah! What sort of people are we to suggest that we have elections August next year, oh! It’s this year I suppose, even this year, a person is completely, completely defiant of the tenets of democracy and is saying it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter? We can go on without parliament as what? You can’t do that, no, no! We never, never went without parliament, every five years we had parliament since 1980, you see and I don’t want our nation to be taught that a sitting government can prolong the term, the life of parliament, this life without a mandate from them.
That’s wrong, we must seek a mandate from the people. If you lose, you lose! When you win, they are afraid, they are cowards, cowards, cowards, you know… cowards I have never seen. There are other situations they may quarrel about, but elections no, they accept that elections must come, but these ones of ours oh, mityutyu, mityutyu means cowards of the last, downright cowards.
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