Bullets fly in Igunga *Send to a friend
Sunday, 25 September 2011 08:44
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By Ray Naluyaga
The Citizen Bureau Chief
Igunga.Bullets blazed the sky of Igunga town in the wee hours of yesterday as the campaign hostility between CCM and Chadema persisted ahead of next Sundays by-election. Police briefly held and questioned two CCM lawmakers (names withheld) over a shooting incident at a hotel where the Chadema campaign team was staying.Police also questioned a senior Chadema campaign official over the fracas that sent residents scampering for safety. The shooting incident came on a day that the Chadema deputy secretary general and MP for Kigoma North, Mr Zitto Kabwe, pleaded with the* competing political parties to focus their vote hunting on issues affecting the constituency.**** *
Mr Kabwe, who is also the deputy leader of the opposition in Parliament, said the Igunga by-election would be a referendum on whether the local people were satisfied with the countrys leadership.* He spoke to thousands of people outside the partys Igunga district offices yesterday, soon after he arrived to bolster his partys campaign team.
* You are not going to vote on the grounds that one attacked the district commissioner and removed her hijab, or because another had a gun or brought in commandos
. you are going to vote on policies best addressing the challenges you are currently facing, Mr Kabwe told a cheering crowd.He added: If Chadema wins, the people of Igunga will be sending a message that the whole nation is not satisfied with the way the country is being governed.
He said that his party, which had 11 MPs only in the last Parliament, had managed to push for changes in the mining sector and expose corruption that afflicted the public sector. Today, as a party with 48 MPs, we ask you to give us another one (MP) and bring to parliament a voice that can speak about the challenges you face, he told the rally.People living in Igunga rural areas had no access to clean water and health care, and were lagging behind in education, he said, adding that those were the issues that should determine the by-elections outcome.
The MP said the death toll among pregnant women and children under the age of five in the area was still very high because the government had not set aside adequate resources and strategies towards maternal and child health care.* Chadema was not promising Igunga voters milk if they elected its candidate, but the party was* committed to bring about leadership changes and defend their interests, he said.* Earlier, CCM and Chadema officials called separate press conferences to comment on the incident at the hotel.
The Citizen on Sunday reporters on the ground heard at least three gunshots at around 3am, each followed by the voice of a woman encouraging the shooter to kill.Chadema Tabora regional chairman Kansa Mbaruk said that at around 2:45am, two vehicles one bearing a CCM flag stopped outside their guesthouse. A voice commanded some people to get out of the car and remove our posters pasted around the hotel, he said, adding that he saw a CCM MP wielding a gun and commanding the youths to torch our two public communication vehicles which were parked outside, he claimed.
Mr Mbaruk further claimed that the MP ordered the youths to destroy Chadema vehicles, saying they had become a nuisance in town. But we raised alarm and neighbours who had heard the gunshots woke up too and scuttled the attack, he said.
Sensing that they were about to be overpowered, the CCM MP allegedly shot three times towards the guesthouse roof, before jumping into one of the cars and speeding away.* However, a second vehicle veered off the road and landed in a ditch about 100 metres from the shooting scene.A crowd chasing the cars arrived and seized it before police arrived and took away the two MPs.
Chademas Singida East MP, Mr Tundu Lissu, protested that despite the fact that it was the CCM MPs who had attacked their party using a pistol, police arrested Mr Mwita Mwikwabe, who was said to have been found with a machete in his room. Mr Mwikabe is Chademas head of campaign team for Igunga.
The arrest was prompted by false claims against Mwikabe that he had shot at the vehicle of a CCM MP when she was coming back from a disco in town. This clearly shows how the police are being misused in law enforcement, Mr Lissu said.* At a separate CCM press conference, the partys head of Igunga campaigns, Mr Mwigulu Mchemba, accused Chadema of taking the two MPs hostage.
I called this meeting this morning to tell you how Chadema bandits and commandos took our MPs hostage while returning to their places of residence at the early morning hours, he said. He claimed that Chadema had been maliciously hunting down CCM leaders, including himself, because the opposition party was not happy to see CCM succeeding in the campaigns.
When given an opportunity to tell journalists her side of the story, one of the CCM MPs claimed that a vehicle was following her after she left a local discotheque, and just before arriving at her hotel someone started shooting from behind. I decided to drive on while calling my colleagues for help
that is when my fellow CCM MP came to my rescue, she said.
She added that she was being targeted by Chadema because the party believed she had* strong influence on the youth of Igunga, whom she had managed to convince to support and vote for CCM.The police confirmed from the shells found at the scene of the incident that a pistol was fires. The police said investigations were still going on, and a full report would be issued later.