ZANU PF on Monday dismissed a reported bomb blast at the home of MDC-T secretary general and Finance Minister Tendai Biti as a “fake incident” meant to draw sympathy from SADC leaders at a crucial summit on Zimbabwe starting on Saturday in South Africa.
The MDC-T has called for a “thorough” police probe into the incident early Sunday morning at Biti’s home in Highlands, Harare.
The small blast from what is thought to be a petrol bomb left a “dent” on the perimeter wall around the house, the party said in a statement. Biti was away at the time.
The incident was headline news in Monday’s newspapers. The privately-owned NewsDay splashed with the headline, ‘Biti bombed’, and the story said the Finance Minister had “escaped death", with a strong hint that the incident could be the work of Zanu PF sympathisers in the security services.
But Zanu PF says attempts to read the purported attack in the context of recent attacks on Biti by President Robert Mugabe are a “dirty tricks” campaign by its ruling coalition partners to play victim ahead of Saturday’s summit.
“It’s a rubbish story which is already contending for rubbish story of the year if not the decade,” said Zanu PF politburo member Jonathan Moyo, part of Zanu PF’s delegation to the weekend summit.
“The idea that any serious media anywhere in the world, even in a banana republic, will claim that a politician has escaped death in absentia is ludicrous.
“Otherwise there is not even one idiot in the world who has been fooled by this MDC-T yarn and its intention. It’s a very clumsy ploy based on discredited Rhodesian Selous Scout-tactics of either getting attention, or distracting attention, and in this case they are trying to do both.
"They are trying to distract attention from their rally which flopped last Saturday, and we know when they want attention they scour hospitals and mortuaries looking for injured people or dead ones to present them as victims of violence.
“Now you can add pseudo stories of petrol bombs thrown at empty houses as if people doing the alleged assassination don’t know that it’s an empty house and there is no-one there.”
Battle lines are drawn between the MDC-T and Zanu PF ahead of the summit. The MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai wants the summit to reaffirm the report of the March 31 Livingstone SADC troika summit widely seen as critical of Mugabe.
Mugabe reacted angrily to the report, suggesting that South African President Jacob Zuma – who is the regional point man on Zimbabwe – had been misled by the MDC-T about the state of affairs in the coalition government.
"To us, Livingstone is a bombshell, there were serious inaccuracies,” Mugabe said at a subsequent SADC summit in Namibia, which however could not discuss the Livingstone report because Zuma was absent. Zuma then offered to host the summit this weekend.
Moyo added: “It’s the same pattern used before the Livingstone summit when they [MDC-T] cooked up a dossier full of green lies, and they used that dossier to mislead SADC leaders by claiming that there was harassment and intimidation against them; claiming that so-called securocrats had staged a coup and were now running the country, and the President was no longer in charge.
“SADC leaders now know that they were taken for a huge ride by Tsvangirai. You should therefore see the bombing yarn as an attempt to distract the attention of regional leaders from the lies they told before Livingstone in order to suggest there is something untoward going on in Zimbabwe, that the Minister of Finance is a target.”
Top Zanu PF, MDC-T and MDC-N officials were gathering in South Africa starting Monday – the start of intense diplomatic lobbying before the weekend showdown which could potentially split SADC leaders.
Moyo added: “There will be two groups in South Africa -- one defending the nation and another attacking it, we will see which of these two groups wins.”