A Pro-Mthwakazi pressure group has condemned the alleged ill-treatment of Chief Vezi Maduna Mafu of Filabusi in Matabeleland South after he petitioned President Emmerson Mnangagwa to set up a commission to investigate the Gukurahundi atrocities.
Chief Maduna was reportedly summoned by the dreaded Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) after his letter to President Mnangwagwa was leaked to the media.
The eminent traditional leader was summoned by the District Intelligence Officer of Filabusi only identified as Mr Mlotshwa.
The move was widely seen as attempts to silence him, after he criticised President Mnangagwa of pushing a tribal agenda meant to disefranchise the Matabeleland region.
Chief administrator of the 1893 Mthwakazi Restoration Movement, Bernard Magugu told CITE that the summoning of Chief Maduna was symptomatic of government’s treatment of issues emanating from the region.
1893 Mthwakazi Restoration Movement (1893mrm) is a registered Movement Trust in Zimbabwe.
“We have noted on numerous instances that when concerns are brought forth by residents of Mthwakazi over targeted abuses, displacements and other forms of systematic discrimination and subjugation, such reports by abaThwakazi are immediately written off as tribalistic reports and ‘unwarranted’ reactions by Ndebele people,” he said.
Magugu claimed that since independence, authorities wanted to silence people from Matabeleland despite the injustices they experienced.
“This is certainly not a sustainable system of eliminating the significance of our very respectful multi tribal Mthwakazi Ndebele nation. The government ought to know that Zimbabwe is indeed a shared territory between two pre-colonial sovereignties whose share of control and power should have been administered equally at the Lancaster House Agreement and beyond, leading to the independence of Zimbabwe after which Mthwakazi was cast to the gallows of Gukurahundi as unwanted ‘chaff’ and human ‘cockroaches,’ he noted.
The activist argued that if President Mnangagwa was sincere about the new dispensation, his government must treat its people equally.
“We would have expected that the response by Mnangagwa and his government to Chief Maduna would have been indeed a meeting accepted by the President himself or in the least of responses a letter from the President himself or his office stating their position as a government, to the concerns expressed by Chief Maduna.
“For the government to respond to Chief Maduna by summoning his presence to the offices of District Intelligence Officer, Mr. Mlotshwa so he is then subjected to colonial style regional arrest (targeted politically motivated movement restrictions) is indeed contrary to the marketed patriotic spirit of freedom and democracy to the people by our ‘democratic’ government,” Magugu said.
The 1893 Movement said it was ironic that the same government would spend “millions hiring an international commission of experts to investigate the military killings of six civilians in the post-election violence of the July 30 2018 elections in Harare on August 1st 2018” yet nothing was being done to address the Gukurahundi atrocities.
In the petition to President Mnangagwa, Chief Maduna questioned the parcelling out of 17 Mining Executive Prospecting Orders (EPO) to people from outside the region.
Chief Maduna also questioned the allocation of land to big corporates at the expense of the local people.
