CUF in at the deep end with bloody clash

Dar es Salaam. Trapped for months in bitter factional bickering, the Civic United Front (CUF) could have reached a point of no return from its dramatic slide into total chaos yesterday after some mysteriously masked gun-toters stormed a press conference venue and turned it into a war zone.

Around 11am, four masked men wielding weapons and a pistol parked a saloon car at the venue of a press conference hosted by CUF Kinondoni district chairman Juma Nkumbi, and bulldozed their way to a room where they launched a reign of terror.

Ruthless and indiscriminate, they attacked journalists and the CUF leadership belonging to a rival faction led by the party’s secretary general Seif Sharif Hamad.

There was total chaos and panic as the apparently blood-thirsty attackers sent everyone scampering. Some people sustained injuries as they fell to the ground with the attackers taking a quick sweep of the room.

After accomplishing their mission, they tried to escape in their car but ran out of luck. A group of people who had gathered outside blocked the attackers from accessing the getaway car, forcing them to run for dear life.

The people managed to ‘arrest’ one of the attackers who got a bitter taste of his medicine, with the furious group giving him a thorough beating. He is believed to be now in police custody.

While this is not the first time for the opposition party to be embroiled in such a nasty physical encounter pitting its rival factions, there is likely to be a lot of interest in the involvement of a pistol this time round.

The key question will be who exactly is behind the four attackers?

Speaking shortly after the incident, a member of CUF’s Supreme Council, Mr Seif Haji Seif, accused supporters of the party’s chairman Prof Lipumba.

“They have been provoking us for a very long time, and we haven’t retaliated because Mr Hamad has been urging us not to do so…but we are all human beings, and each one of us has his/her level of tolerance,” said Mr Seif.

The party’s ideology and publicity secretary, Mr Mbarara Maharagande, who belongs to the Hamad faction, condemned the incident and called on the authorities to find a way of resolving the crisis “before it gets out of hand”.

The crisis in CUF began last year after Prof Ibrahim Lipumba, who had resigned as chairman ahead of the 2015 General Election, decided to rescind on his decision.

Last August, the fighting took a dramatic twist during an extraordinary national congress that had been called to elect his successor. Although he was not a delegate, Prof Lipumba dramatically forced his way in to the meeting. That did not help to stop the majority of delegates to vote in confirmation of his resignation. As expected, his supporters were angry. Chaos ensued. The meeting ended prematurely.

And in a ruling that gave the professor a major boost in his bid for the CUF chairmanship, the Registrar of Political Parties, Judge Francis Mutungi, dismissed the decision by the Supreme Governing Council to expel him from the party suggesting that it came a little too late to block the former economic adviser to the World Bank.