e this eye-witness account.
The two front-page stories are replete with resonances from the country’s past. History will acknowledge the gratitude all freedom-lovers owe to Zimbabweans who are bravely exposing the terrible things being done in their country under Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship.
I was most forcibly struck by the echoes from the near and distant past in these reports. First – the ruling Zanu (PF) has covered up its complicity in the murder of generals before, by burying them with full military honours at Heroes Acre. The most obvious example from the past is Josiah Tongogara’s death, explained as a motor accident, which will always arouse suspicions that this was a cover-up.
Mugabe’s recent giveaway remark at General Mleya’s funeral “…it was known that politics leads the gun and not the other way around”, speaks volumes. The late Robson Manyika, a former ZANLA Chief Commandant for Training and Personnel told me back in 1980: “The party controls the gun, the gun does not control the party.” His untimely death in the 1980s was also surrounded with suspicion.
The late Josiah Tungamirai, a liberation war general who might ultimately have come out as a witness to the truth regarding ‘premature’ military deaths, has fairly recently died relatively young.
Reading of the lethal injections administered to two of the latest victims of the Mugabe regime’s alleged purging of military personnel gives credence to the belief that Josiah was done away with because he was a close friend of Tongogara.
Most likely he was spared the same fate until he was believed to have become critical of Zimbabwe’s descent into shame under the ignominious rule of Zanu (PF).
We can go further back in history, finding a parallel in the recent, alleged ‘railway crossing’ death of General Gunda. Some of us still alive now, were around when the popular nationalist leader, Dr Tichafa Parirenyatwa, was reported, by the then ruling regime, to have died at a railway crossing. Few fellow nationalists believed it then, and almost nobody believes it now. Circumstantial evidence re General Gunda’s alleged political assassination, reported in The Zimbabwean to have emanated from family members, is hard to ignore.
There was a civilian death in the 1990s which resonates starkly for me when reading of the bewilderment of family members who ‘mysteriously’ lost their sons: the state of the supposedly crashed vehicle in which Gunda died reminds me of the whole nasty setup surrounding the death of Christopher Giwa in a ‘road accident’.
Especially sad for me is a reminder of the word ‘pestered’ (to stand for Zanu PF… in next year’s elections) which Gunda’s cousins have recently given to the press. That is the same word that the brilliant young Giwa used when he told me how hard Zanu (PF)’s ‘spooks’ tried to subvert his loyalty to the Forum Party, led by the late Enoch Dumbutshena in the early 1990s.
Back to killer cars: the mystery surrounding the state of the vehicle in which Peter Pamire was supposed to have died when, as it was officially concluded, “his Pajero’s brakes failed” is another of several cases in point. What of Christopher Ushewokunze, Moven Mahachi and Sydney Malunga and, come to think of it, in the early years of Independence, Stephen Parirenyatwa? They and others too numerous to mention – if we are to believe all the spin surrounding their deaths – were, figuratively speaking, devoured by rogue vehicles.
Finally, I can understand why General Chiwenga is reported to have sweated and become shrill in the face of a concerted shout of Hatikuzivi (we do not know you) from the soldiers assembled before him on Tuesday 14 August. I am reminded of the response that came from the rank and file of the fighters in the camps in Tanzania when Bishop Abel Muzorewa gamely attempted to persuade them to accept him as their leader in the last stages of ‘the Struggle’ for the liberation of Zimbabwe (the then Rhodesia) from colonial rule.
I was there, in Tanzania in late1975, collecting material for my Who’s Who of Nationalist leaders when I was told that the cry: “we will choose our own leaders!” went up in Mgagao and other guerrilla camps. They chose Robert Mugabe. With General Chiwenga, Mugabe’s appointee, and other leaders proving a disappointment to the rank and file of today’s military, who will they choose when it comes to the crunch and will he (or even she) be a soldier or a politician?
Post published in: News