Former Zanu-PF official and opposition Front for Economic Emancipation in Zimbabwe (FEEZ) leader Godfrey Tsenengamu has thrown his weight behind exiled former cabinet Minister Saviour Kasukuwere to be an independent political candidate in the upcoming 2023 elections.
Addressing a press conference on Thursday, Tsenengamu claimed that President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s has since launched a manhunt for Kasukuwere who is believed to be in South Africa with the intention of eliminating him before the crucial plebiscite.
The former outspoken Zanu-PF youth leader said FEEZ will support Kasukuwere as its candidate.
“So, the candidate that we have approached, that we have engaged, to consider coming home and contest as an independent political candidate is comrade Saviour Kasukuwere. In the third way people had different views, different feelings,” he said.
“The Saviour Kasukuwere who was in Zanu-PF since 2000 and the one we are talking about right now are different. If you engage him and talk to him, you will praise God. What he has gone through has transformed him totally.
He added: “You remember him coming out saying ‘I’m a political thug’, but if you talk to him now, his language is about uniting people. It’s about peace and harmony. He has spent five years in exile. He now understands what it means to be out of power.
“As we speak, they (Mnangagwa) want to eliminate him before he comes to Zimbabwe because they know that he is a threat. We have been told that they have assigned some hitmen.”
During the peak of factionalism in Zanu-PF in 2015, Kasukuwere who was the party’s political commissar, described himself as one of the biggest political thugs in the liberation movement, signaling that something was wrong.
“I am one of the biggest political thugs in Zanu-PF and some of these people are small thugs,” he said.
Kasukuwere and his colleagues, former cabinet Ministers Jonathan Moyo, Walter Mzembi and Patrick Zhuwao fled the country in November 2017 after Mnangagwa ousted late former President Robert Mugabe through a military coup.
Kasukuwere a former intelligence officer has a checkered history in Mt Darwin relating to political violence in which his supporters abducted, maimed and killed opposition members.
