Regional branches of Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF party have joined growing calls for President Robert Mugabe to resign.<\/p>\n
The move comes ahead of a protest march to be held in the capital Harare on Saturday, fully supported by the country’s military which staged a takeover on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
War veterans until recently loyal to the 93-year-old president and liberal groups have also urged him to quit.<\/p>\n
Earlier Mr Mugabe made his first public appearance since the takeover.<\/p>\n
Mr Mugabe had been under house arrest for days, but attended a graduation ceremony on Friday, handing out degrees.<\/p>\n
The army made its move after a power struggle over his successor. Mr Mugabe sacked Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa last week, apparently to pave the way for his wife Grace Mugabe – who is four decades younger than him – to take over the presidency instead.<\/p>\n
The military said it was “engaging” with Mr Mugabe and would advise the public on the outcome of talks “as soon as possible”.<\/p>\n
In an unprecedented broadcast, several regional leaders appeared on state TV saying that he should quit.<\/p>\n
They also called for Grace Mugabe to resign from the party, and for Mr Mnangagwa to be reinstated in the party’s central committee.<\/p>\n
The party’s members agreed to mobilise support for and attend Saturday’s rally. The party is planning to hold a special central committee session over the weekend to discuss the crisis.<\/p>\n
BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Regional branches of Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF party have joined growing calls for President Robert Mugabe to resign. The move comes ahead of a protest march to be held in the capital Harare on Saturday, fully supported by the country’s military which staged a takeover on Wednesday. War veterans until recently loyal to the 93-year-old president<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5598,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}