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Joice Mujuru

ZIMBABWE People First leader Dr Joice Mujuru was humiliated by hordes of youths from Matabeleland when she addressed a rally in Pretoria, South Africa, recently. The raucous crowd was miffed that Dr Mujuru — a former Vice President of both Zanu-PF and the country — was out to capitalise on the early 1980s disturbances in the Midlands and Matabeleland region to gain political mileage.

This was after the ZimPF leader announced during a rally in Gwanda that she intended to visit Bhalagwe in Kezi to pay homage to victims of the disturbances. Video footage of Dr Mujuru’s rally in Pretoria shows marauding youths being restrained from molesting the ZimPF leader with some remonstrating with South African police officers and marshals.

The angry youths told Dr Mujuru that she had no moral standing to seek to capitalise on the unfortunate events of the early years of independence now that she was in the opposition trenches when she failed to do so during the 34 years she was a senior member of Government and the ruling party.

Records show that Dr Mujuru never raised the issue even when she was Vice President of Zimbabwe for a decade. Reports also indicate that some senior officials of ZimPF in Matabeleland are fiercely opposed to her apparent attempt to capitalise on the emotive issue to endear herself to the people of the region and are quietly nudging her to drop the mission. This presents her with a dilemma. Dr Mujuru is trying to reinvent herself as a latter day democrat and is desperate to curry favour with her Western funders but is finding it difficult to dissociate herself from Zanu-PF — the party which in essence made her.

As a fresh-faced ex-combatant with little formal education, President Mugabe took her under his wings and personally tutored her at Zimbabwe House in the early years of independence. He even appointed her the youngest member of Cabinet notwithstanding her clear lack of capacity and encouraged her to further her education after she passed her O- levels.

The hand-holding continued through various appointments to different portfolios in Government culminating in her elevation to the second most powerful position in the country during the 2004 Zanu-PF Congress at the HICC. Her fall from grace is well documented but we will aver that it was down to a lust for power and wealth which she and her husband — the late Retired General Solomon Mujuru — were guilty of.

Dr Mujuru and her late husband’s allies have coalesced to form ZimPF but it is the alliance with Mr Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC-T which exposes the murky deals cut in dark corridors. President Mugabe has always lashed out at those within the ruling party who sup with the Devil at night but pretend to champion the cause of the masses during the day.

WikiLeaks inadvertently exposed these unholy alliances but it is increasingly becoming clear that the so-called coalition of opposition forces under NERA (National Electoral Reform Agenda) is a consummation of a long courtship whose seeds were sown when Dr Mujuru was still in Government and Zanu-PF. Her association with characters like Ambassador Agrippa Mutambara — a retired Brigadier General who served at the pleasure of President Mugabe in various diplomatic postings around the world — betrays her reliance on her departed husband’s allies for political survival.

Those with long memories will recall that Rtd Brig Mutambara is the same man accused of rape by Judith Todd — a daughter of former Rhodesian Prime Minister Garfield Todd — in the early 1980s. The ambassador was to later famously claim that he had been instructed to do the sordid act by none other than Gen Mujuru — further obfuscating an already complicated matter.

Today, Ambassador Mutambara is a leading figure in ZimPF and at the weekend he was at the centre of an attention-seeking stunt in Guruve where he fired shots at Zanu-PF youths and when they defended themselves — he cried foul. Pictures of an injured Ambassador Mutambara and other officials from his party have been splashed all over the media as part of a spirited campaign to keep Zimbabwe in the international spotlight.

On Monday, the MDC-T also paraded “wounded” activists before Western diplomats, the private and international media in a desperate bid to shore up their waning fortunes. The United Nations General Assembly and other international summits have come and gone but Zimbabwe has remained unscathed despite naked attempts to foist it onto the agenda of these platforms.

Clearly, the opposition parties have come to the end of their tether in as far as pushing for the intervention of outsiders in the country’s internal affairs is concerned. As for the likes of Dr Mujuru and Ambassador Mutambara who are beneficiaries of President Mugabe’s good heart and benevolence, we strongly urge them to desist from seeking to besmirch the name of the man who essentially made them. They might live to regret it.