Making political capital out of a national tragedy

Making political capital out of a national tragedy

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• Lance Guma: Mkhwananzi's mix of sense and non-sense

• George Mkhwananzi: Ndebeles and Zimbabwe national leadership

• Lance Guma: Lessons drenched in blood

• Black murder, white murder

• Dumisani Zifa Ndlovu: 'Mnangagwa has Matabele blood on his hands'

• Mnangagwa, Dabengwa clash over Mat massacres

• Mugabe faces class lawsuit over massacres

• Honour of journalist who first exposed Mat killings

By Geoffrey Nyarota

THE Zimbabwe Standard on Sunday published one of the most fascinating stories to appear in the Zimbabwe press last week.

Considering that the story was eight days old and therefore almost stale by then, I was puzzled that no other publication had picked it up.

Running the story under the headline “Ncube breaks down over Gukurahundi”, the Standard reported that Welshman Ncube, the tough-fighting but much-maligned secretary-general of a breakaway faction of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), allegedly broke down under intensive interrogation by journalists in the city of Gweru on Saturday April 22.

Ncube and the president of his faction, Arthur Mutambara, were invited guests at the Gweru Press Club.

Apparently, the journalists hosting the politicians subjected their guests to a barrage of hard-hitting questions. As he attempted to rebut allegations that he was on the payroll of the ruling ZANU PF party, Ncube is said to have chocked on his words and slumped in his chair right in front of the flabbergasted journalists.

Smelling blood and totally unmoved by the pathetic situation, a hard-nosed Zimbabwe Standard correspondent dutifully recorded details of the unfolding drama.

“There have been all sorts of allegations about my association with ZANU PF by (Morgan) Tsvangirai and other people in his faction,” he quoted Ncube as saying in self-defence. “It has been said I was given a farm by ZANU PF, that ZANU PF bought me a Mercedes Benz, and that I am on their payroll. I was never a member of ZANU PF.”

Ncube then asked his tormentors how he could ever have been a member of ZANU PF considering that the same party had caused much suffering to his family in Matabeleland and the Midlands during the Gukurahundi atrocities in the 1980s.

Ncube originally comes from Lower Gweru in the Midlands.

“My brother was killed just 30 kilometres away from here during that time when Tsvangirai himself was still a ZANU PF commissar,” he revealed.

“My grandfather was also killed and for six days the army did not allow us to bury him. We were only able to bury him after we asked for the intervention of my cousin, Sobuza Gula-Ndebele, who used his influence as he was then with the military intelligence,” he said.

Gula-Ndebele is now the attorney-general of Zimbabwe.

“We buried my grandfather right where he had been shot as we could not lift him because his flesh was falling off as it was in a very advanced state of decomposition,” Ncube added.

Then he broke down, the Standard reported. Mutambara reportedly rushed to Ncube’s rescue and directed that any further questions be directed to him.
I have an idea of the inner torment that Ncube must have experienced as he tried to recount the catastrophe that befell his family in those tragic circumstances.

I was a school teacher in the Nyamaropa communal lands along the border with Mozambique, an area heavily infiltrated by ZANLA guerrillas during the war of liberation. I have first-hand experience of atrocities committed by the Rhodesian security forces and by ZANLA and I sympathise with Ncube.

In 1989, a few years after the tragedy that befell the Ncube family at the hands of Gukurahundi, College Press published a book, Turmoil and Tenacity, which was edited by then President Canaan Banana and sought to promote the unity agreement signed between PF ZAPU and ZANU PF in 1987.
Ncube contributed a chapter to the book, in which he dwelt at length on the emergence of the dissidents and the deployment by the government of the Five Brigade to deal with them.

This was a good 10 years before Ncube, then a law lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, became the Movement for Democratic Change’s secretary-general on the party’s formation in 1999 and 15 years before the episode at the Gweru Press Club a fortnight ago.

In his chapter in Turmoil and Tenacity, Ncube stated that after the sacking of PF ZAPU ministers from the government in 1982, a number of former ZIPRA combatants had taken back to the bush.

Ncube wrote: “In January 1984 the then Minister of Home Affairs, in seeking a renewal of the State of Emergency, informed the House of Assembly that in the preceding six months these armed men had murdered 75 people, carried out 284 robberies and been involved in 16 rapes.

“Two years later, in January 1986, the Minister of Home Affairs in seeking yet another renewal of the State of Emergency informed Parliament that during the previous six months of 1985 dissidents had murdered 103 people, raped 57 women, committed 263 armed robberies and destroyed property worth millions of dollars.”

Ncube stated that in material terms the dissident war was devastating in that virtually all development projects in Matabeleland had been brought to a standstill and that, for example, by early 1984 nearly 500 000 acres of commercial farmland in Matabeleland had been abandoned by fearful white farmers.

He stated that in attempting to eradicate banditry and dissidents, the government had deployed the army in Matabeleland, but the activities of the army in the process had given rise to accusations of severe brutality by the soldiers against innocent people.

“This reference to the ugly occurrences associated with the banditry problems in Matabeleland and the Midlands ought to be made so that the success and benefits of national unity can be viewed within their proper context,” he wrote.

“After the signing of the unity agreement and the installation of Robert Mugabe as the first Executive President of Zimbabwe, the new President declared a general amnesty and in terms of Section 31(1) of the Constitution of Zimbabwe granted a free pardon to all dissidents who, on or before March 31, 1988, reported to the police in order to claim benefit of the pardon. He also pardoned all ZAPU political fugitives who were out of the country to escape prosecution and all persons who had collaborated with dissidents in violation of the laws of Zimbabwe.

“With the surrender of all the dissidents, peace returned to Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands. The atrocities and brutalities that had been characteristic of dissident activities all came to an abrupt end. For the first time since the liberation war started in earnest in the early seventies, the people of Matabeleland were experiencing normal life,” he wrote.

It is worth noting that given this magnificent opportunity, three years after the cessation of hostilities in Matabeleland, Ncube did not seize on it to record for prosterity the real context of Gukurahundi from his personal experience. It is amazing that Ncube did not raise then the issues that caused him to slump in his chair at the Gweru Press Club recently.

I am not in a position to state categorically whether or not Ncube has become the beneficiary of any of ZANU PF’s many resources of patronage, as alleged by those who interrogated him that evening in Gweru or by others before them who have levelled similar allegations against him.

But I wish to address the issue of whether a man who has been victimised by a political party can ever associate with the same party.

Jonathan Moyo was a cabinet minister in the government of President Robert Mugabe. He served loyally, dynamically and zealously in that capacity for a total of four years.

As chief government spin-doctor, Moyo incurred the collective wrath of the citizens of Zimbabwe when on April 11 2003 he pronounced: “Where the army is deployed, people should not expect a picnic.”

He was commenting on the deployment of the army against innocent and unarmed civilians.

Power does corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton wisely put it in his now famous words. Two years earlier Moyo had surprised those who knew him by his previous reputation as a fierce fighter for democracy, fairness and justice, when he stated on July 31 2001: “It is clear to anyone who can read the writing on the wall that ZANU PF is the future.”

Yet when Moyo was fired or resigned from ZANU PF, depending on who you were listening to at the material time, he took the public by total surprise when he disclosed a personal experience that he had kept a closely guarded secret.

As he clutched at straws while fighting for political survival ahead of parliamentary elections early in 2005, Moyo made the mindboggling revelation that his father had fallen victim to the massacres committed by the Five Brigade during the Gukurahundi atrocities.

“My father . . . was killed in 1983 in Tsholotsho in a tragic encounter with elements of the Zimbabwe National Army who took his life during Zimbabwe’s post-independence dark period generally referred to as the Gukurahundi Era,” Moyo declared in the curriculum vitae that he submitted to ZANU PF’s national electorate directorate to facilitate his vetting as a candidate in the party’s primary polls in January 2005.

I rest my case, having successfully proven, I hope, that a man can be abused, victimised or traumatised by a political party and still associate with it somehow or other.

It is also my hope that the point has been made patently clear that it is most unbecoming for politicians to attempt to derive personal political capital out of the national tragedy that was Gukurahundi.
This article was originally published in the Financial Gazette. Contact the writer at: gnyarota@yahoo.com
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