Mujuru says her ouster was long planned – ‘They saw me as a threat’

By Blessings Mashaya

Former Vice President and now Zimbabwe People First (ZPF) leader, Joice Mujuru, has made sensational claims that President Robert Mugabe began plotting her expulsion from Zanu PF and the government in 2006 — a mere two years after the nonagenarian had elevated her to the party’s presidium.

Addressing thousands of her supporters who packed Rudhaka Stadium in Marondera at the weekend, Mujuru also said her experience was that Mugabe did not care much about Zimbabweans and their current suffering.

She said her problems with the nonagenarian and those around him began in 2006 when she had tried to introduce empowerment and other people-oriented programmes to help the marginalised people of Binga.

“In 2006, ndipo patakatanga kushaudwa kuGweru vari kubirthday after ndaenda kunoita maprogrammes aisumudzira vanhu kuBinga (It was in 2006 that Mugabe first criticised me after I tried to help the people of Binga).

“They saw me as a threat. From 2006 up to 2014 they were trying to expel us until they cooked up charges to boot us out from the party,” Mujuru, who was appointed into the Zanu PF presidium in 2004 where she became Mugabe’s deputy both at party and government level, said.

Her then controversial appointment came after Mugabe changed the Zanu PF constitution to insert a clause which included appointing women to the party’s presidium, a promotion that came at Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s expense.

Mujuru’s 42-year association with Mugabe and Zanu PF was ended in the run up to the ruling party’s hotly-disputed 2014 congress, when she and other then high ranking officials were expelled on untested allegations of plotting to oust and assassinate the nonagenarian.

“People may want to question me why I worked with Mugabe for many years and failed to tell him that he was destroying the country.

“But you must know that we were very young, uneducated, without any experience and exposure when we got into government. So, we were looking to him as our elder, and as you know, culturally it’s not good to challenge your elders,” she explained.

Mujuru said she was to later realise that Mugabe was running down the country, and at that stage it was too late to stop him.

“After some years we started to see that he was leading us in the wrong direction. That’s when we started to do what we thought was right for the people of Zimbabwe and he saw it as a threat,” she said.

Mujuru’s political star in Zanu PF first dimmed publicly in 2008 when Mugabe conspiratorially suspected that her late husband — the revered former liberation struggle icon, General Solomon Mujuru — engineered his embarrassing trouncing in that year’s polls to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

Mugabe and other Zanu PF bigwigs claimed that Rex was behind the formation of Mavambo/Kusile/Dawn, an opposition party that is led by former Finance minister Simba Makoni. Daily News