Paul Nyathi
President Emmerson Mnangagwa is a very cheeky man.
After the huge barrage on Ndebele people of Matabeleland by his mouth piece, Monica Mutsvangwa, the President has hurriedly convened a meeting with members of the disgraced Matabeleland Collective an organisation which he captured last year to use as his endorsing authority in the Matabeleland region.
ZimEye.com is reliably informed that the meeting will be held at the Bulawayo State House on Friday.
Mnangagwa knows it from the bottom of his heart that he is extremely not favoured in Matabeleland because of his leading role in executing the eighties Gukurahundi atrocities that killed over 20 000 people in the region.
In an effort to spruce up his image in the region, he successfully hijacked a Matabeleland cluster of civil society organisations, The Matabeleland Collective, which he has been holding meetings with claiming to be the inclusive representation of the region.
The major highlight of his meetings with the Collective has been to fastrek a sub called conclusion to the Gukurahundi issues that will leave him vindicated.
The visit to Bulawayo by Mnangagwa comes at a time when the region is up in arms against his goverment after Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa made a huge tribal slur against the people of the region.
Sources close to the issue told ZimEye.com that Mnangagwa’s visit and meeting with the collective is to try and appease the region of Mutsvangwa’s utterances.
Mutsvangwa burst out on Saturday accusing the head of the Zimbabwe Catholic bishops congress of stoking division and seeking to create a “genocide” after the group spoke out against alleged rights abuses and economic woes.
On Friday, the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference (ZCBC) issued an unusually strong letter deploring the thwarting of anti-government protests on July 31.
The bishops denounced the “unprecedented” crackdown on dissent and weighed in on Zimbabwe’s long-standing social and economic crisis, which the government vehemently denies.
In the statement Mutsvangwa said the letter had been written under the “evil minded” leadership of ZCBC president Archbishop Robert Ndlovu.
Mutsvangwa accused Ndlovu, a member of Zimbabwe’s Ndebele minority group, of “fanning the psychosis of tribal victimisation” and sowing “sins of collective guilt” among the Shona majority.
She likened the archbishop to Athanase Seromba, a Rwandan priest who was found guilty of crimes against humanity for facilitating the killing of Tutsis during the 1994 genocide.
“Ndlovu is inching to lead the Zimbabwe Catholic congregation into the darkest dungeons of the Rwanda-type genocide,” Mutsvangwa said, adding that the letter sought to revive the “perennial vices of division”.