HARARE – Glen View South MP Vimbai Tsvangirai-Java, the daughter of the late former MDC leader and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, survived a horror crash which killed two friends near Kwekwe on Monday night.
Paul Rukanda, her campaign manager and organising secretary for her constituency, and Tafadzwa Munzwa, her late mother’s cousin, were trapped in their vehicle for over an hour before emergency services and police arrived. They died from their injuries, party officials said.
Not much is known about the condition of the occupants of a second vehicle involved in the crash, and what may have caused the head-on collision.
Tsvangirai was transported by ambulance to a Harare hospital and is in a “stable condition”, MDC spokesman Jacob Mafume told ZimLive.
He said the vehicle in which Tsvangirai was travelling had four occupants. It was involved in a head-on collision just after Kwekwe towards Harare, as they returned from Bulawayo where the party hosted the latest round of debates between candidates vying for leadership positions at the MDC’s congress later this month.
Said Mafume: “The president (Nelson Chamisa) and the MDC family is devastated. There was a head-on collision just after Kwekwe. Two people have unfortunately passed away.
“We have lost two committed cadres, two pillars of the party. It’s painful, it strikes at the heart. We pray for the strength of the families, and to everyone.
“Vimbai Tsvangirai is in a stable condition, she has been taken to Harare, to the Avenues Clinic, and the other passenger has been discharged. We are praying, and we ask the nation to join us in prayer that the day will not get more tragic.”
A brief statement from the MDC posted on Twitter earlier was accompanied by the mangled wreckage of the car from which Tsvangirai was pulled. It appeared the vehicle’s doors had been hacked off by fire fighters to free the casualties.
In other crash scene pictures, a second vehicle is seen with its bonnet smashed in – a telltale sign of a head-on collision.
