By Jealousy Mawarire
The Zimbabwe People First (ZimPF) party is deeply concerned about President Robert Mugabe’s gloating over the Gukurahundi massacres in his attempts at wading off pressure from a section of war veterans in his party who are agitating for his retirement.
Ordinarily, such issues are a preserve for Zanu-PF internal processes and should remain as such but Mugabe’s allusion to Gukurahundi where he used the disgruntlement of a handful war veterans as an alibi to embark on ethnic cleansing of mostly Ndebele speaking citizens in the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces gives rise to fears that the cornered dictator might once again use this excuse to unleash unprecedented violence on the swelling opposition to his failed incumbency countrywide.
As a party with the most number of war veterans within its ranks, and being fully aware that Mugabe has been using the slightest excuse to suppress popular disapproval of his reign, we condemn, in the strongest sense, the callous and shameless gloating over that cruel past by Mugabe.
That Mugabe wants to use the barbaric massacre of innocent civilians, children and pregnant mothers disembowelled in front of their now traumatised, impoverished and pauperised offspring to scare off disgruntled war veterans is psychopathy taken too far.
The threat against war veterans, both within Mugabe’s disintegrating party and without, should not be taken lightly since history has shown that the Zanu-PF leader has a perchance for pursuing a scotched earth policy whenever he is faced with strong political opposition.
All right thinking Zimbabweans should therefore be worried as past experiences have shown that Mugabe resorted to exterminating more than 20 000 innocent civilians in reaction to political opposition from a handful disgruntled war veterans.
Faced with a swelling opposition to his rule at the turn of the millennium, Mugabe isolated 4500 white commercial farmers whom he accused of financing opposition politics and in turn killed the whole agricultural sector and downstream industries effectively killing the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of commercial farm workers and employees of agro-based manufacturing and processing industries.
Mugabe also reacted to his waning political fortunes through the decimation of our social fabric and family units by haunting out of the country the most productive members of our society who are now political asylum seekers and economic refugees in neighbouring and overseas capitals.
When he was convinced most of the opposition to his rule was in urban areas, he unleashed the so-called Operation Murambatsvina to internally displace opposition political parties’ supporters.
His reaction to political challenge has often been excessive hence the need for us to rise and stop this madness at the polls in 2018 or earlier if he brings them forward. At the moment, however, we urge all opposition political parties, civil society and every right-thinking and patriotic Zimbabwean to register their disquiet with the aging dictator and pile pressure on the regime to attend to pertinent issues affecting the country.
We need the Mugabe administration to quickly locate the missing $15 billion, reign in corruption in parastatals which has gobbled more than $3billion since Mugabe’s re-election in 2013, revive industries, resuscitate the agricultural sector and attract foreign direct investment into the country not threats of genocide.
As we seek to build Zimbabwe, we urge the millions who support our party programmes and urge them to be cognisant that as we seek to build this country, there is need to demolish the oppressive Zanu-PF system that has presided over the total collapse of our economy and the extermination of our dignity as a people.
Jealousy Mawarire is the spokesman for the Zimbabwe People First (ZimPF) led by former Vice President Joice Mujuru
