HARARE - This week we celebrate a little more than a year after the Guthrie Munyuki Interview launch and today brings you some of the “sound bites from the gem-packed interviews which have made this column popular with many readers.
Below are some of the excerpts.
Temba Mliswa
I have been inspired by the bible. I have read the bible. And here I am today with what I have gone through.
I have a duty and I cannot stop to discuss my duty because of certain people. There are certain people who believe are bigger than the institution (Zanu PF”.
Welshman Ncube
But everything else is virtually as it was in July. But we spent six months on a merry-go-round.
And it was deliberate, calculated, to waste time so that we do not do the real things that ought to be done.
It is the failure to appreciate this Zanu PF strategy that we will be chasing red herrings until the election is unavoidable and the things that we ought to do have not been done.
And this is our profound disappointment with our colleagues in MDC T in failing to appreciate how Zanu PF is running rings around them. And they serve you with tea; they make you think you are important because they have included you in the meantime you are being deceived.
The strategy of three Ds – delay, deceive and destroy. That’s what’s being applied to them,” Ncube said.
Bruce Wharton (US Ambassador)
The US is not blocking the sales of diamonds; we are only restricting US companies and individuals from trading with listed enterprises and individuals.
The irony is that the protestors were supplied with alcohol and coordinated by people who neither represent the majority of Zimbabweans nor have this country’s best interests at heart.
McDonald Lewanika
If you look at the way that the bench, both at the level of Constitutional Court, Supreme Court and the High Court, the way that it is constituted, it has been constituted in a way that we have seen a lot of purging taking place of perceived independent voices or people who are generally not supportive of the status quo.
So what you have at the end of the day is to a very large extent a judiciary that is captured by political interests.
And in a country where justice should prevail when you have got a captured judiciary it does not bode well both for the independence of that particular framework but also for fairness to be able to prevail.
So given that understanding and the way that the bench seems to be stacked with people who are sympathetic to the current president (Mugabe), a judgment of the nature that we got from the Constitutional Court was not totally unsurprising.
Vimbai Nyemba
Women must utilise that, must be involved in politics. You will be surprised that things having been given to women you will find no woman coming in, you will find a few. We want women to be involved.
We want parliament, cabinet and the presidium to be full of women. Everything has been given to us. It’s for us to take.”
Tendai Biti
And everyone who is in his right mind must appreciate the importance of the banking sector particularly a foreign bank.
The person in Britain will not give his money to John Chibadura’s bank whom he doesn’t know but he will put his money in Standard Bank or Standard Chartered Bank because he knows those.
He knows that if they default, he’s got recourse.
So international banks, you actually need them for international financial mediation which is so desperately required in this country.
Lovemore Madhuku
That is an exaggeration. When you go to an election which is based on the winner-take-all system, you always have the danger of one party dominating parliament.
So Zanu PF is not the only party in Africa or in the world that has a two thirds majority.
It’s very common with a winner-take-all system. But it doesn’t follow that with a two thirds majority you necessarily either amend the constitution or become a one party state.
Deborah Bronnert (British Ambassador)
Our aim is clear: we want to support the Zimbabwean people and the implementation of the GPA in order to enable free and fair elections and a peaceful, prosperous and democratic Zimbabwe.
Before I came to Zimbabwe, my Prime Minister told me that he wanted me to engage with everyone.
I talk to all parties from across the political spectrum and am ready to engage with everyone.
There have also been ministerial meetings and, as I’ve already noted, we were pleased that minister Chinamasa came to London and participated both in the FoZ meeting but also, alongside his colleagues, with other political meetings, including with the FCO minister Mark Simmonds (MP).