Chronicle Editor
President Emmerson Mnangagwa has scoffed at attempts to sow division among fraternal SADC states and disrupt Zimbabwe’s hosting of the regional body’s summit in a fortnight.
The past few months leading up to Zimbabwe’s hosting of the 44th SADC summit this month have witnessed concerted campaigns on social media to foment a diplomatic row between the sister states of Zimbabwe and Zambia, while some opposition activists have been agitating to disrupt Zimbabwe’s hosting of the SADC summit on August 17.
Speaking during the burial of pioneer Zimbabwe independence armed struggle combatant, Makhethi Ndebele who died in Cowdray Park, Bulawayo on July 28, President Mnangagwa said as was the case with imperialism, these efforts are bound to fail.
Eighty two year-old Ndebele, whose liberation war name was Jack Mpofu, was among the first 200 armed combatants to join the armed struggle in 1967, and later become an instructor through whose hands many liberation war heroes passed through.
He was a member of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA)’s high command. He suffered lifelong injuries in the landmine explosion that killed former ZIPRA commander, General Nikita Mangena during an ambush by the Rhodesian Forces near Deka Drum in the Zambezi Valley on 28 June 1978.
“Presently, there are concerted efforts to reverse the gains of our protracted liberation struggle. These attacks take many forms, including peddling falsehoods about our country. It is a shame that there is a deliberate and foreign funded campaign which is void of the evident and unprecedented success milestones we are witnessing across every facet of society and the economy. We shall never be deterred or discouraged. We are marching forward ever, backwards never,” said President Mnangagwa.
“The strategies by some powers designed to sow discord and division between fraternal states in our region and in our continent will never succeed. We defeated imperialistic agendas to achieve our liberation and Independence. We shall defeat them in the present, again and again.
“Their interests are never designed for Africa and its people, but to control our strategic resource endowments, including our God-given minerals, which we have in abundance. Wherever their nefarious machinations show their ugly face, these shall be resisted, both in honour of our heroes and for the economic prosperity, peace and stability for present as well as future generations.”
Ndebele was born on 6 June 1942 in Plumtree, Mangwe District under Chief Tshitshi, in Matabeleland South province.
He attended Tshitshi Primary School and Mbakwe Mission for his primary and secondary education before joining the liberation struggle among the first 200 cadres to join the war of liberation in 1967.
This was after ZAPU and ZANU successfully lobbied the Organisation of African Unity to train cadres for the war of liberation.
Following his initial training, he proceeded for further training in reconnaissance and intelligence in the then Soviet Union.
Upon his return, he was appointed instructor at Morogoro in Tanzania, where many guerrilla fighters and Umkhonto weSizwe cadres passed through his tutelage.
He was later deployed to the front, operating as a commander in the Western Front with other senior ZIPRA cadres in areas such as Victoria Falls and Hwange.
New Ziana
Online Reporter