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Harare, Zimbabwe | AFP | Zimbabwe’s main opposition party is facing the threat of damaging splits just months before a historic election, as feuding erupts after the death on Wednesday of its leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Tsvangirai’s final months were accompanied by increasingly public quarrelling between his three deputies over who would succeed him as head of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The party — which has a history of splintering — had been trying reunite to fight the coming election, but the death of its widely-admired founder triggered renewed rivalry.
Fresh divisions could mean that President Emmerson Mnangagwa and the ruling ZANU-PF face little opposition at the election, which is expected before July.
Voters will go to the polls for the first time since Robert Mugabe, who ruled Zimbabwe with an iron fist since 1980, was ousted in November after a military intervention.
“We are going to see a major split in the MDC now that Tsvangirai, who was the glue that held the party together, is gone,” Harare-based political analyst Alexander Rusero told AFP.
– Competing claims –
The latest bickering came to a head when one of the deputy leaders, Nelson Chamisa, called a meeting at MDC headquarters in Harare the day after Tsvangirai’s death.
Chamisa had supposedly been named as the interim MDC leader by Tsvangirai as he underwent cancer treatment in South Africa.
Hundreds of party activists gathered outside the building to honour Tsvangirai — but without the party’s other deputies, Thokozani Khupe and Elias Mudzuri.
A furious Khupe lashed out at Chamisa.
“Tsvangirai dies and you go on with a meeting to appoint yourself as leader. How shameful!” she told the local press.
“You are power-hungry. You can’t even wait for two days to have Tsvangirai buried.”
Shortly before Tsvangirai’s death, Mudzuri visited him in hospital in Johannesburg to establish his own claim to be the rightful heir.
