By Patience Rashai

Continuous acts of desperation by embattled MDC supporters through demonstrations on the side-lines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) led to unnecessary provocation from MDC supporters against Zimbabwe anti-sanctions lobbyists in New York, over the weekend.

“Having realised that their planned demonstration against the Zimbabwean government had failed they marched here and started pushing us shouting enda, enda, enda (go away) and singing maruza imi (you have lost), and yet in actual fact they are the ones who failed whatever they intended to achieve,” said Evermore Chigunwe, a Zimbabwean residing in New York.

“They are accusing us for being funded by the Zimbabwean government yet all we are doing here is calling on the removal of sanctions which we have witnessed affecting our kinship back home,” said Chigunwe.

Asked whether she had been frog marched to come to the protest, Chigunwe said that she had learnt of the march from a poster.

“I just saw posters of this march on social media and chose to come support this noble cause on my own accord,” she added.

MDC deputy organising secretary Happymore Chidziva was on record last week saying that they had dispatched a team to New York to organise protests in collaboration with the party’s North America province against President Mnangagwa’s administration whom they allege to be behind the falling Zimbabwean standards.

Sadly MDC is failing to accept and appreciate that the call for removal of sanctions is not Zanu PF orchestrated, instead the whole of Africa is standing with Zimbabwe on this call.

Recently, at a SADC Heads of State meeting in Tanzania, the regional bloc committed to pressure the West for the unconditional removal of sanctions, setting aside October 25 of this year as anti-sanctions day, a reality MDC is yet to grasp.