via ‘Mutsvangwa must shut up’ – DailyNews Live Mugove Tafirenyika and Tendai Kamhungira • 25 March 2016
HARARE – The Zanu PF youth league has implored ousted War Veterans minister Christopher Mutsvangwa to shut up, taking umbrage with his alleged continued disrespect for President Robert Mugabe.
Speaking at a youth rally held at Rudhaka Stadium in Marondera on Wednesday, Zanu PF deputy youth secretary Kudzai Chipanga had no kind words for the sacked minister.
“It is time we tell Mutsvangwa to shut up,” Chipanga said.
“If he is fed up with our president, he should go to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission and withdraw his vote.
“It’s time we call a spade a spade because we now have people in the party who wear party regalia but speaks a different language. We must identify them and show them the door.”
Chipanga said he was going to mobilise one million youths to meet Mugabe in May and assure him that they were fully behind him adding that Mutsvangwa should take heed of the warning from the youths.
“They (Mutsvangwas) want him (Mugabe) to leave office because they benefitted from him politically, including in the land reform and indigenisation, but we have not as youths. So he must rule until he dies,” Chipanga said.
Speaking at the same gathering, Mashonaland East State Provincial minister Ambrose Mutinhiri, also attacked Mutsvangwa, a former Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA) chairperson, ordering him to shut up and stop bragging about his war credentials.
“I heard some of us saying VP (Phelekezela) Mphoko deserted the war.
“Some people must shut up and hear from us who were in the war from the early stages. Some who are bragging do not even know how the war was executed. I was privileged to command both Zipra and Zanla (Zapu and Zanu PF military wings respectively), so there is little that I don’t know,” the retired brigadier-general said.
This comes after Mutsvangwa recently said Mphoko, 75, had allegedly ditched his regiment in Mozambique to enjoy life with his then wife-to-be, Laurinda, who he married in 1977.
“Mphoko came to Mozambique as part of Zipa (the Zimbabwe People’s Army, which was a combined military structure of Zipra and Zanla) in 1975 and was head of logistics,” Mutsvangwa told the Daily News in a recent interview.
“Zipa collapsed a couple of months down the line, (and one of the pioneers of the armed struggle, Rogers Alfred) Mangena and others went back to Zambia to resume operations as Zipra.
“He (Mphoko) didn’t go back with them. He remained in Maputo, and somehow got lost completely. That’s why nobody knows him in Zipra. Ask all the big numbers of Zipra cadres, they don’t know him because he was no longer part of the army.
“He was in Mozambique and eventually married a Mozambican woman. So for the crucial five years of that war (1975 until independence in 1980), he was absent. He is neither Zipra nor Zanla,” Mutsvangwa said.
“He got married to a family that was close to . . . Machel. The wife is Shangaan, you can check, a Chironga woman from the Maputo region. How can you have an absentee commander? He was not there for five years,” Mutsvangwa said.
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