War veterans’ need to democratize

zwnews.com Political Reporter

Political commentators have called war veterans to democratise in order to be relevant in the current political scene.

Analysts  Tamuka  Chirimambowa and Tinashe  Chimedza said the recent statements by war veterans declaring that they were opposed to a ‘dynasty ‘meaning that they will oppose any attempt to make Grace Mugabe the next president of Zimbabwe should be done in the spirit that, they are also prepared to reform.

 “The national liberation was also a struggle for democratisation and those that lead that process cannot re-mobilize the people only to hand them over to a new Stalin and use that new support to bargain for their own seat at the table rather than for a genuinely people oriented developmental project.,”

 “Yesterday’s Stalin was delivered to Zimbabwe via a personality cult that was built on the legitimacy of the liberation project and we as Zimbabweans must reject that another Stalin be

Delivered to us on the basis of a narrow conception of the liberation narrative. That we must refuse and the War Vets have to get this loud and very clear,” said the analysts.

The war veterans have been blamed for being at the fore front of keeping Mugabe in power.  Facing eminent ouster in 2008, the war veterans were used by the Mugabe regime for torture opposition supporters and raping of defenseless women to retain the aging ZANU-PF leader to power.

The war vets fired the first salvo in which they openly challenged the President Robert Mugabe and criticized what they called ‘the systematic entrenchment of dictatorial tendencies, personified by the President and his cohorts’ and further that this has resulted in a collapsed economy, rampant corruption and suffering of people.

“Considering that the last such robust statement last came in the mid-1970s when the guerillas, gathered at Mgagao, and supported the rise of Robert Mugabe, the Declaration was quickly labelled a Mgagao Number 2.

While the party-state apparatus went ballistic and accused the War Vets of ‘treason’ civil society and the opposition lauded the statement as a welcome breath of fresh air from a social bloc, which has always been seen as too much imbricate in the party-state apparatus of rule.