Jonathan Moyo to rebury father killed by Mugabe troops during Gukurahundi

By Tatenda Dewa | Harare Bureau |

The family of Jonathan Moyo, the Higher and Tertiary Education minister who is strongly supporting President Robert Mugabe’s re-election in 2018, will soon re-bury the former Zanu PF spindoctor’s father, Melusi Job Mlevu, who was killed during Gukurahundi.

Moyo, once a fierce critic of Mugabe, is currently fighting from within a Zanu PF faction called Generation 40 (G40) which wants the president to re-contest the 2018 presidential poll when he would have turned 94 and following decades of failing to arrest a bludgeoning economic crisis.

Local Independent media reports indicated that the Mlevu family has written to the district administrator in Tsholotsho, Gloria Raundi, to allow them to exhume Mlevu’s remains from a shallow grave where he was buried in 1982 and have him re-interred at a family graveyard.

The burial is set for the weekend, according to NewsDay.

“As the Mlevu family, we, therefore, seek your (DA’s) approval for the reburial of our late relative and former councillor for Tsholotsho, Melusi Job Mlevu, who passed away in 1982,” read the letter written by the family, dated 28 September and signed by Headman Mlevu.

“His remains were buried between Kapanyana and Ziga. As a family, we want to properly rebury the remains where we have other family graves according to our cultural practices. The reburial will be open to members of the public and, if permission is granted, we will notify your respectable office of the time and date,” said Mlevu.

Mlevu was a councillor from PF Zapu, a led party led by the late nationalist, Joshua Nkomo, that Mugabe’s government accused of banditry.

Mugabe unleashed a crack military deployment, the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, in southern Zimbabwe which killed around 20,000 civilians.

Mlevu was reportedly abducted by the Fifth Brigade in 1982 and ordered to dig his own grave before he was killed in cold blood and shoved into the shallow grave, becoming one of the earliest victims of the Gukurahundi crackdown that commenced the same year.

Moyo confirmed that Mlevu was his father but insisted he was not aware of the re-burial arrangements.

“I don’t know what you are talking about regarding the letter you are referring to, since I am neither its author nor its addressee,” he said.

Moyo, who is reported to have grown up without his father, reportedly remains secretly bitter at how his father was killed and the Gukurahundi massacres, which he said cannot be wished away.

His current support for Mugabe is seen not as genuine, but a strategy to survive a rebound from a rival Zanu PF faction led by Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Moyo is said to be bitter with Mnangagwa for abandoning him in 2004 when they jointly plotted a coup against Mugabe.

Mnangagwa ditched Moyo and several provincial party chairpersons who backed the plan at the last minute when he learnt that their plot had been unmasked by another Zanu PF camp then led by Solomon Mujuru, the late husband of Joice, who now heads the Zimbabwe People First (ZimPF) party. Nehanda Radio