HARARE – Zimbabwe main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai yesterday toured a shanty settlement outside Harare where residents told him how the government has broken promises to build them better houses after a controversial slum clearing campaign two years ago. 

Tsvangirai, whose Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party nearly ousted President Robert Mugabe and his ruling ZANU PF party in elections in 2000 and 2002, was mobbed by residents who thronged to see him at Hatcliffe Extension, a shanty settlement 20km outside Harare. 

He visited several shacks in the neighbourhood where people narrated heart-rending stories of their struggle to eke a living. 

“It is clear that the regime lied to the people. Two years after Operation Murambatsvina, it is clear that the regime has failed to deliver on its own promises to provide decent housing,” said Tsvangirai, whose MDC is seen as weaker after splitting into two rival parties in 2005. 

“As the MDC, we believe that democracy starts with a decent roof over your head. In the new Zimbabwe that we envision, people should not live in such squalor,” he said. 

Operation Murambatsvina is the official name of President Robert Mugabe’s controversial urban clean-up campaign that a United Nations envoy said displaced 750 000 people and indirectly affected another 2.4 million out of the 12 million Zimbabweans two years ago. 

Zimbabwe holds joint presidential and parliamentary elections next year after the MDC and ZANU PF agreed constitutional reforms to bring forward the parliamentary vote by two years so it could be held together with the presidential ballot in 2008. 

The once prosperous southern African nation is in the grip of its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980, marked by the world’s highest inflation of nearly 8 000 percent, unemployment of about 80 percent and chronic shortages of food and fuel. 

Western governments and the MDC blame the crisis on repression and wrong policies by Mugabe such as his farm seizure policy that destabilised the agricultural sector to leave the country dependent on food aid. 

Poor performance in the mainstay agricultural sector has also had far reaching consequences as hundreds of thousands have lost jobs while the manufacturing sector, starved of inputs, is operating below 30 percent of capacity. - ZimOnline