Harare – It’s birthday party time in Zimbabwe again – but no prizes for guessing which politician got the biggest cake.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai celebrates his birthday this week, less than two weeks after longtime rival President Robert Mugabe held his 93rd birthday party in southern Zimbabwe.
Tsvangirai turns 65 on Friday. That makes him 28 years younger than the president.
Supporters in the town of Chinhoyi arranged a party for the Movement for Democratic Change leader earlier this week, reports say. Video uploaded to YouTube by co-vice president of the MDC Nelson Chamisa, shows Tsvangirai bending over a square blue-and-white birthday cake (still in its cardboard box) to blow out the candles. Party supporters dressed in red, the MDC’s trademark colour, then sing and dance.
Watch the video below.
Tsvangirai announced in June last year that he was receiving treatment for colon cancer.
The number, size and donors of Mugabe’s birthday cakes caused controversy this year, as they have done in previous years. Mugabe’s main cake traditionally weighs the same number of kilograms as his age – so this year it weighed 93kg and needed more than one person to carry it. There were calls for Zimbabweans to boycott Lobels bakery, which provided a cake. Others defended the popular baker, saying it had no choice.
