via Muchinguri faces Zanu PF chop – DailyNews Live Bernard Chiketo • 20 December 2015
MUTARE – In what could prove to be the tipping point in the post-congress Zanu PF’s seemingly unstoppable factional and succession wars, the Daily News has reliably learnt that political heavyweight Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri is on the verge of being hit with the party’s infamous vote of no confidence.
This comes as allies of the Water minister, seen as the godmother of Manicaland by virtue of her seniority in the province, are being booted out of Zanu PF one after another as punishment for defending her, and as Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s supporters are under the cosh in the ruling party as the battle to succeed President Robert Mugabe hots up.
The party’s youth league in Manicaland announced on Thursday that they had passed votes of no confidence in their chairperson Kelvin Manyengavana, commissar Washington Ziwiwi and executive member Gertrude Mutandi over their participation in a meeting where Muchinguri-Kashiri was recorded attacking her Zanu PF foes.
Mubuso Chingunu, who announced the ejection of the trio from the party, has since assumed the leadership of the regional youth organ.
“The trio also stand accused of holding unconstitutional clandestine meetings with Comrade OCZ Muchinguri from time to time where they discussed and deliberated matters to do with the youth league, bad-mouthing senior party leaders, and therefore defeating the whole sense of following proper party protocols of the provincial youth league to be answerable to the national youth league as stated in article 25/230,” Chingunu said.
Well-placed sources told the Daily News yesterday that Muchinguri-Kashiri was now “definitely in the firing line” of her party enemies, and that she could “suffer the same fate” as that suffered by former Vice President Joice Mujuru, whose allies were purged one by one last year before her eventual ouster from power.
At the heart of the deadly ructions is the battle to succeed Mugabe, where a faction loyal to Mnangagwa is locked in a bitter battle with ambitious Young Turks known as the Generation 40 faction, who are pushing for the appointment of a woman vice president in place of the beleaguered VP.
Such a move would, if successful, fatally dent Mnangagwa’s chances of ever succeeding the increasingly-frail Mugabe.
Muchinguri-Kashiri’s allies claim that the G40 has instigated the axing of several of her supporters in Manicaland, all of whom are allegedly ultimately loyal to Mnangagwa, in a plot to “incapacitate” the VP.
COMMENTS