Mugabe aide rips into ‘best minister’

via Mugabe aide rips into ‘best minister’ 3 August 2014

TOURISM Minister Walter Mzembi has been on a high after being publicly praised as one of the ‘best ministers’ by President Robert Mugabe.

Writing in the Saturday edition of The Herald, a columnist believed to be Mugabe’s spokesman, George Charamba, dragged the youthful minister over the coals, accusing him of making reckless statements, “playing shy with being black” and becoming a willing lackey to white imperialists.

Mzembi appears to have offended the columnist while launching hisNational Tourism Policy in Harare last month when he lambasted war veterans and ruling Zanu PF supporters for disrupting tourism activities in the Save Valley Conservancy.

President Mugabe had, only a few weeks earlier made clear that Zimbabwe was no country for whites, as far as agricultural land was concerned, insisting that the few remaining white farmers must leave.

Mzembi presented his new policy in the presence of vice-president Joice Mujuru  who is said to be eager to take over from the 90-year-old Mugabe when he is off the political scene.

Undermining Mugabe is a risky enterprise in Zanu PF and by suggesting that the few remaining whites should be protected when the veteran leader had said they must go, Mzembi was clearly pushing his luck.

“They also triggered questions about the manifesto of the ruling party, apart from the fact that a few weeks back, the President had made contrary points regarding whites and land in the country.”

Mzembi is part of the Mujuru camp in Zanu PF which is considered moderate and likely to ditch Mugabe’s radical policies should they win the hotly contested succession battle.

Worse still, the minister had not only questioned the outcome of last year’s elections but also insulted the country’s majority blacks.

Said the columnist: “To try and appeal to national sentiment for the preservation of  ‘the few remaining whites’ in a country which remains trenchantly a white economy, frankly is to insult the many blacks precariously hanging on to “few” livelihoods in this inhospitable world they should call home.

“It is to foolishly suggest that power and mortality reside in numbers. In any case vapera here kwavakabva? Surely it does not take much to know that whites have always been few in this country, even during their heydays, but that their power has always been disproportionately huge, augmented by the many blacks who trip over each other to serve them?

“And such reckless statements make nonsense of the electoral outcome, indeed raises questions about whether political processes like elections do actually liberate us from being lackeys.

“Much worse, why do our ministerial statements contradict the messages behind the vote that installed us, that silenced the very “few whites” whose political proxies we defeated so resoundingly? And when a black man struggling to free themselves from a colonial economy says “let’s respect property rights”, what futures is he implying for himself and his race?”

Zimbabwe, Manheru reminded the minister, is a “black African man and woman’s country, the same way that Britain is a white man and woman’s country. Full stop. Too bad for whoever gets discomfited.

“And to say so, declare so, is not to outlaw from this country other peoples in their colours who might seek to carve a life here. It is to state an ownership fact which should always be incontestable, that should be borne in mind at all times by all comers, of recent or in history.”