By Lance Guma
So this week we were treated to some breathtaking hypocrisy as the Commander in Sleep was ranting and raving about how the army should not interfere in politics. Honestly speaking President Robert Mugabe must think the people of Zimbabwe have the combined intelligence of a banana.
“The military has no right you know, to be interfering with the political processes,” a shameless Mugabe told a meeting of his party’s Women’s League. He added that the army should only play a supporting role based on “the principle that politics shall always lead the gun and not the gun politics.”
In 2008, after an embarrassing loss to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, Mugabe via the Joint Operations Command (JOC), a grouping of all the state security agencies, deployed over 200 senior army officers countrywide to carry out the brutal Operation Mavhotera Papi (where did you vote).
An estimated 500 perceived MDC-T supporters were killed, while tens of thousands were tortured and maimed. The regional grouping SADC intervened and through the efforts of former South African President Thabo Mbeki a shaky coalition government was formed as a compromise.
In the eighties, army units loyal to Mugabe rampaged through villages and towns in the Midlands and Matabeleland provinces butchering an estimated 20 000 innocent civilians according to a report by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace.
While Mugabe justified the crackdown as an attempt to suppress an insurgency by armed dissidents the conduct of the Fifth Brigade who were deployed betrayed other intentions. It became clear Mugabe used the alleged “insurgency” to justify the mass murder of people mainly from the Ndebele tribe who were perceived as supporting the opposition Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu).
To hear Mugabe warning the army not to interfere in politics in just plain laughable. When he lost elections in 2008, it was convenient for him to turn to that same institution to rescue him and engineer a violent election run-off that saw him literally grab victory from the jaws of defeat.
It is clear what has stunned Mugabe more than anything is the realisation that his deputy Emmerson Mnangagwa has the unwavering support of the army generals when it comes to the succession battle. He also believes the war veterans are now being used as proxies by the Generals to fight him.
In 2002, the late former Commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Force (ZDF), General Vitalis Zvinavashe, declared, “Let it be known that the highest office in the land is a straight jacket whose occupant is expected to observe the objectives of the liberation struggle. We will, therefore, not accept, let alone support or salute anyone with a different agenda that threatens (the) very existence of our sovereignty, our country and our people.”
Back then Mugabe did not say anything because this suited his own agenda.
In 2008, Zvinavashe’s successor and current army chief, General Constantine Chiwenga, shocked all and sundry with the statement, “elections are coming and the army will not support or salute sell-outs and agents of the West before, during and after the presidential elections … We will not support anyone other than President Mugabe, who has sacrificed a lot for this country.”
So in 2017 when Mugabe comes up with the statement “the military has no right you know, to be interfering with the political processes,” he must surely have taken too many naps and somehow thinks in his dreamland such nonsense will wash with the citizens of Zimbabwe.
You sir are a shameless hypocrite.
