Paul Nyathi|MDC deputy national chair Job Sikhala has asked to be excluded from taking responsibility for the widespread celebrations that the country experienced at the removal of former President Robert Mugabe from power blaming all those who did for the current military run state the country is faced with.

Sikhala was responding to questions during Thursday’s Media Centre organised Town House public discussion on the State of the Nation address.

“Exclude me, I did not participate in that nonsense. Firstly, being a scholar of history not as a lawyer alone, knowing well that where the military has taken a leading role in the changing of government, nowhere in Africa have soldiers led a democratic change.

“We knew we were going through a military coup and a military coup would only be supported by those people who did not have the eyes to see that we are being taken into a trap of a worse dictatorship,” said Sikhala.

MDC founding leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who passed away on Valentine’s Day last year, endorsed then Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s rise to power following the coup, with both Tsvangirai and his successor Nelson Chamisa attending the new Zanu PF leader’s first inauguration in Harare December 2017.

Tsvangirai and his party’s leadership attended the coup’s main rally at Zimbabwe Grounds in Highfields while thousands also took part in the march demanding Mugabe “should go.”

Sikhala explained why he thought Zimbabweans marched.

“Zimbabweans were tired of lies, for example that poverty is because of sanctions. Secondly, they had a chance to get rid of a stubborn and murderous Mugabe who killed thousands in Matabeleland in what was (one of) Africa’s first genocides.”

Watch video downloading below: