BY SILAS NKALA
THE opposition Zapu party has claimed that the late former President Robert Mugabe forced the late former Vice-President Joshua Nkomo to sacrifice his party Zapu resulting in it being swallowed by Zanu PF in order to stop the 1980s Matabeleland genocide.
Addressing an event to commemorate the Unity Day which was born out of the Unity Accord signed by Mugabe and Nkomo in 1987, Zapu spokesperson Iphithule Maphosa claimed the accord was only to end the Gukurahundi massacres which human right groups say claimed 20 000 lives from Matabeleland and Midlands.
“Zanu PF only had one condition that it wanted met in order to stop the madness, and it was that PF Zapu must be swallowed by Zanu PF and cease to be an opposition party. This was the condition that summed up what is now known as the Unity Accord Agreement document,” Maphosa said.
“The 1987 Unity Accord document is quite weird and makes for sorry reading. There is nothing about unity discernible in any of its clauses. It is just a requirement that PF Zapu surrenders to the British Conservative Party project of 1963 with Mugabe as its leader in perpetuity,” he said.
He said for Zimbabweans, the 1987 Unity Accord document meant PF Zapu ceding all its rights to existence to Zanu.
“The party then and now uses ethnic lenses in deciding every aspect of national policy. To them, anybody and anything that was not Zanu at that time represented the enemy, hence the use of the toxic reference to dissidents equating PF Zapu and the Ndebele speaking people alone with that term. It is a tribalist mindset,” he said.
Maphosa said it was sad that for 34 years Zimbabwe had been celebrating what is disguised as unity day after the loss of thousands of lives in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces.
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