Zim opposition leader Tsvangirai accorded a state funeral

OPPOSITION leader Morgan Tsvangirai has been accorded a state funeral, with a service to be held at the National Sports Stadium, in Harare. He will be buried the following day, next to his first wife Susan, at his rural home, Buhera, a twohour drive south of the capital.

The Movement for Democratic Change ( MDC), the party that Tsvangirai, and civil rights activists formed in late 1999, took the decision yesterday.

Tsvangirai, 65, died in a Johannesburg hospital on Wednesday after a two-year battle with cancer, and his body will arrive in Harare today.

Since the soft coup d’etat last November, new president Emmerson Mnangagwa and the state media, including the television station, have dramatically reduced the propaganda against the opposition generally and Tsvangirai in particular.

For more then 17 years, the daily Harare paper, The Herald, which is 50 percent- owned by the state, published reports critical of Tsvangirai and the MDC. He was almost never given right of reply by either news reporters or columnists.

But times have changed and although the state and public media remain biased in favour of Zanu-PF, the tone against the MDC and traditional “enemies” such as the UK has been tempered since the change in power.

All radio stations in Zimbabwe are either owned by Zanu-PF members or by the state’s newspaper group.

Mnangagwa’s government says it will cover all of Tsvangirai’s funeral costs. He has declined to bury Tsvangirai at the Heroes’ Acre, outside Harare, but many say his family and the MDC would not have wanted him buried there anyway.

National Heroes’ Acre is largely reserved for ruling Patriotic Front guerrillas killed during the independence war

he North Koreans designed much of Heroes’ Acre, about 20 km south-west of Harare. For- mer president Robert Mugabe’s grave and one next to it, presumably for unpopular former first lady Grace Mugabe, were prepared for use in 2016.

The MDC has an interim new leader, lawyer Nelson Chamisa, aged 40. The party is beset with divisions about its constitution which names Thoko Khupe as the vice-president, elected at the party’s last congress two years ago. Insiders say Khupe has little support among the majority of the seniors in the party.

The MDC is part of an alliance of opposition party’s which plans to take on Zanu-PF in the elections in July. Chamisa has been named as the MDC candidate in the presidential elections.

T.

Morgan Tsvangirai was leader of the Movement for Democratic Change.