Robert Mugabe Minister Blames Journalist on Mnangagwa Fallout… FULL STATEMENT

A former cabinet minister who served for four years in ousted late long-ruling Zimbabwe despot Robert Mugabe’s Government has revealed how he fell out with then VP and current leader President Emmerson Mnangagwa which saw him fleeing into exile upon the dramatic ascendancy of the later on the back of a military coup in November 2017.
Zimbabwean authorities have euphemistically branded the chaotic events that characterised the toppling of the once dreaded late former president, as Operation Restore Legacy.

And roughly three years after Mugabe fell, fugitive former Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development deputy minister Godfrey Gandawa claims that his ‘beef’ with Mnangagwa started after he exposed a state media journalist hired on a mission to front the current leader’s succession agenda.
While dissociating self from the mutilated G40 cabal, then viciously opposed to a perceived Mnangagwa camp named Team Lacoste, Gandawa apparently rues his spycraft on the state media journalist who he further exposed through a leaked recording, labeling it his ‘great undoing’.
The exiled former minister said the scribe’s exposé brought him into the ‘direct line of factional political fire’ as he was eventually labelled a G40 loyalist. Consisting of the so-called Young Turks in the long-drawn-out Zanu PF succession battles, G40 was aligned to Mugabe’s wife, Grace.

“My great undoing came about after a state media journalist attempted to recruit me in a plot to overthrow President Mugabe, claiming he had been sent by then Vice President Mnangagwa,” Gandawa said in a statement Tuesday this week.
“I was compelled by the oath of office to report the incident and recorded a second episode with the same journalist. That audio recording is now in the public domain through no actions of my own.”
He added:
“The publication of that recording immediately identified me as being hostile to Mnangagwa’s ambitions and brought me into the direct line of factional political fire, resulting in my removal from Government at the 2017 coup when Mnangagwa eventually seized power.”

In the same report titled, ‘I am Sorry for Working with Zanu PF’, Gandawa took a scathing attack on poorly evidenced claims insinuating that he contributed to the violation of human rights during the Mugabe era.
“I have felt, for sometime, compelled to issue a statement to settle longstanding accusations that I was a central cog in Zanu PF and participated in its violation of human rights,” he writes.
Gandawa narrated how he joined the party in 2013, the same year he interacted with Mugabe one-on-one, for the first time.
“My decision to run on a Zanu PF ticket (in the 2013 elections) was merely the path of least resistance given that my community, Magunje, was a Zanu PF stronghold. While I was aware of Zanu PF’s many failings, the objective was not to challenge the political order, but to better serve the community through effective representation in Parliament,” he said.

Zwnews