ZANU PF’s Constitutional Parliamentary Select Committee (Copac) co-chairperson Munyaradzi Paul Mangwana has opened up that he feared for his life after supporters of President Robert Mugabe labelled him a sell-out on national television accusing him of working against the 88-year-old leader’s party, an accusation he rejects.
“If someone labels you a sell-out, munouraisa munhu (you can cause someone to get killed),” Mangwana told ZBC-TV at the weekend after he filed a $1 million defamation lawsuit against the sole State broadcaster.
“I was supposed to have got the right to respond to the serious allegations that were directed at me. I never sold out, I represented my party well at Copac and the politburo knows that. It is not allowed by the law of this country that someone can tarnish the image of someone without facts.”
He did not explain how he fears for his life or if there are people who have threatened his life.
Mangwana was reacting to a TV programme screened by the national broadcaster, where panellists accused him of selling out, describing him as worse than those who massacred Zimbabweans at Chimoio and Nyadzonia during the liberation struggle in the 1970s.
The panellists claimed Mangwana was worse than Morris Nyathi, the alleged freedom fighter-turned-traitor who guided Rhodesian forces in the brutal pre-independence massacres at Nyadzonia in Mozambique in 1976.
The panellists further claimed that Mangwana supported homosexuality and was paid by imperialists to sell out on Zimbabwe’s interests.
However, the Chivi Central MP said he believed that the new draft constitution was a great improvement from the Lancaster House Constitution which has been amended 19 times since the country’s independence in 1980.
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He said the recent holding of a peaceful Second All-Stakeholders’ Conference showed that Zimbabweans were mature enough as no violence occurred unlike in the first stakeholders’ meeting where Zanu PF militants disrupted proceedings. —VOP
