The Sunday News
Harare Bureau
ZANU-PF’S structural realignment that ejected elements of the Joice Mujuru-led putschist cabal will re-energise the party for the 2018 elections, President Mugabe said yesterday.
Describing the cabal as “dead”, he dissuaded party members from settling personal scores by needlessly accusing each other of being linked to the group that wanted to oust President Mugabe in 2014.
Zanu-PF’s President and First Secretary said though re-organising leadership structures was painful, the party emerged re-invigorated.
He was addressing the party’s National Consultative Assembly at Zanu-PF headquarters in Harare.
“I am sure you agree with me that even now, as we speak, our revolutionary party is going through a difficult time, a painful one, of re-organising its leadership structures to lead Zanu-PF to another resounding victory at the polls in 2018.
“It is undergoing some change, metamorphosis, regeneration, recreation, taking place through the cleansing process. We are doing some hygiene of cleaning our party.”
President Mugabe said he knew of Dr Mujuru’s plan to destabilise Zanu-PF with the ultimate objective of unseating him at the 6th National People’s Congress in December 2014.
The scheme, he said, involved targeting key party organs, starting with the youth.
“When we went to Congress last year, some of our erstwhile comrades whose faces we do not see here today, were the ring-leaders behind a well-orchestrated subversive activity that, really, was about planning, planning of a coup de tat.
“They had their secret methods, which we discovered later. The clandestine use of money, use of certain privileges, exchanging them to certain persons of their own choice and promises made to many people; to some of us who are even here. ‘We will make you this, we will make you that’. Who were they to say so?”
He continued: “It was then I knew that something was afoot; that some of these evil plans had been hatched. They said, ‘Let the youth wing fail and then it would be the failure of the leadership of the party.’
And if that was so, then it was an occasion to say, ‘You see, under the leadership of President Mugabe and so and so . . . this is what they have done, let’s change it.’
“Of course, you know what the plan was: The youth were told that come Congress, they would all, in unison — women later — this was to be the case; they will all, in unison, say, ‘We want change, change, change and so change.’
“And that noise, if it was to have a heavy impact, would be regarded as the voice of the people. And that would then be the sentence passed on President Mugabe in favour of Mai Mujuru. You would think that such was naïve and the work of mature people turned into idiots.”
The President also said, “After those multitudes of people who voted me into power, then you get the Gamatox to say ‘go’. I say, ‘Who are you? Shout the loudest and I will not hear, but let the Congress say so, my Congress, the people’s Congress, but not you’.
“(Dr Mujuru) was a great believer in witchcraft . . . you would think that with all that understanding that she had gained in the party, all that apparent religion and education, through her doctorate, that one would certainly at least ask oneself: ‘Is this real?’”
