Zim veterans withdraw Mugabe leadership mandate

War veterans claiming to be ZANLA members say they no longer recognised President Robert Mugabe as their leader.

Harare - A group of war veterans claiming to be members of the Zimbabwe National Liberation Army (ZANLA) High Command and General Staff, on Tuesday said they were renouncing the Mgagao Declaration which ushered in President Robert Mugabe as the President of ZANU in 1976, saying they no longer recognised him as their leader.

The group, led by Parker Chipoyera, said it was the war veterans at Mgagao training camp in Tanzania who had agreed to endorse Mugabe as president in 1976 after falling out with then Zanu President, Ndabaningi Sithole. Thus, they claimed, they were entitled to withdraw the mandate from the nonagenarian leader.

“It is abundantly clear that Robert Mugabe was not elected, but selected to lead Zimbabwe’s Armed Struggle. We, the war veterans who agreed to the authorship of the Mgagao document and appended our signatures to it, now withdraw the mandate we gave Robert Mugabe to be the leader,” Chipoyera said.

He said the purported recent meeting between war veterans and President Mugabe as their patron was a mockery to the former liberation war fighters and the country as a whole, as its outcome was predetermined.

Mapoyera claimed that a chairperson of the war veterans association in Harare had been paid $15 000 to buy the allegiance of the war veterans, while another from Mashonaland Central was also paid an unspecified amount.

He said the meeting, whose attendance was by invitation, was attended by pseudo war veterans while bonafide liberation war fighters were excluded because they were opposed to Mugabe’s misrule and his divide and rule tactics.

“It was clear to everyone that most attendees were past the age of liberation war fighters, but some old villagers, who were paid to attend, ululate and sing praise to Mugabe the dictator of the century.

“The majority of the attendees have neither the conscience nor the complete knowledge of the liberation history. Mugabe is a habitual rigger who has brazenly rigged his own Indaba.”

If Mugabe was sincere about wanting to solve problems affecting the former fighters, Chipoyera said he should have consulted with leaders of the war veterans associations, surviving members of the High Command, members of the general staff and operational detachment commanders from both ZANLA and ZIPRA.

“All these categories are well acquainted with the problems and challenges being faced by war veterans. Instead, Mugabe resorts to the game he knows best, of divide and conquer. Money changed hands in an effort bribe allegiance and loyalty for the president,” he charged.

Chjipoyera said state resources were used to pay for full board accommodation for comrades from the provinces and to address long outstanding welfare concerns in order to smoothen the acrimonious relations before the meeting.

He said some leaders had been booked in at four star hotels in Harare almost a week before the meeting.

Mugabe, he said, no longer had the interests of the former freedom fighters at heart as evidenced by his sanctioning of the police to teargas them and douse them with water for demanding a meeting with him earlier this year.

He said it was wrong for people to think that all veterans of the armed struggle should be Zanu PF supporters, saying people went to war to liberate the country and not Zanu PF.

“The War veterans home is Zimbabwe, not Zanu PF. The bigger picture is not a silo called Zanu PF, surprisingly we in Zimbabwe have a culture of people who say I belong to Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC and Mugabe’s Zanu PF. These silos are designed specifically to fragment Zimbabweans, yet the bigger picture is about Zimbabwe. War Veterans fought for Zimbabwe, they did not fight for Zanu PF,” he said.

African News Agency

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