JOSHUA Nkomo’s veiled statue erected in the dead of the night on a Bulawayo street two weeks ago is attracting fresh controversy after a minister refused to reveal where it was carved.
The three-metre tall bronze statue of the nationalist icon and former Vice President at the intersection of Main Street and 8th Avenue remains covered in a black cloth – Home Affairs Minister Kembo Mohadi says because only President Robert Mugabe can do the unveiling.
“We are working with the President’s Office to find a suitable date for the unveiling ceremony,” Mohadi, whose ministry was responsible for commissioning the statue, said on Monday.
But it has emerged that Nkomo’s family was denied information about where the statue was made, after a radio station claimed that it had been carved in North Korea – a country associated with training a notorious army unit which annihilated supporters of Nkomo’s PF-Zapu party in the early 1980s.
Rights groups say 20,000 civilians were killed in the military operation by the Fifth Brigade launched ostensibly to rid the Matabeleland region of a dozen “dissidents” who refused to hand over arms at the end of a guerrilla war with the former white minority government.
Locals in Bulawayo have even speculated that the clock and dagger manner in which the statue was put up on a 1,2 metre high pedestal was to cloak the fact that North Korean engineers mounted it.
The statue was a “Zimbabwean concept”, and that's what matters, Mohadi insists.
“This statue is Zimbabwean, it is a statue of a Zimbabwean and it was a Zimbabwean concept. I am not at liberty to reveal to you where exactly it was carved,” the minister said.
A second statue is set to be erected in the capital Harare. An attempt to mount it at the Karigamombe Centre ran into problems after the site’s owners, the Mining Industry and Pension Fund, obtained a court order preventing the government from putting it on its property.