Opposition suspends top officials

Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has suspended eight top officials, including four lawmakers, from party positions amid internal squabbles, AFP reported on Monday.

Welshman Ncube, the MDC secretary general, said the eight, who include Learnmore Jongwe, the party's chief spokesperson, and Tapiwa Mashakada, shadow finance minister, were relieved of their duties pending a probe into the in-fighting. They will remain ordinary party members while investigations are under way into factional clashes last month.

In a late-night attack on 27 September, a house and cars belonging to one of the suspended parliamentarians, Job Sikhala, were stoned and his two-week-old daughter was injured. The MP alleged that the assailants were fellow MDC members. The party's national council, its supreme decision making body, "met and decided that ... (they) will step down from their positions and will not perform any official functions so as to facilitate the work of the investigating team," Ncube said.

Colleagues have reportedly accused Mashakada, a senior member of the MDC since its inception in September 1999, of wanting to destabilise the party and unseat leader Morgan Tsvangirai ahead of presidential elections next year. The fate of the suspended officials will be decided once the investigating team makes its report and disciplinary action is taken. The MDC is the first party to pose a serious challenge to President Robert Mugabe's 21 years of uninterrupted rule. The labour movement based party last year won 57 of the 120 contested seats in legislative elections.