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Bid to oust Mugabe suicidal

by Lloyd Gumbo
27 Jan 2015 at 07:05hrs | Views
Information, Media and Broadcasting Services Minister Professor Jonathan Moyo says it takes someone "suicidal" to seek to remove President Mugabe from power after his overwhelming victory in the July 31, 2013 harmonised elections.

Prof Moyo said while the West had failed to remove President Mugabe through founding and funding the opposition, they resorted to using some people within Zanu-PF to push for the ouster of the Head of State and Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces through succession politics.

Prof Moyo made the remarks while delivering a lecture to students of Joint Command and Staff Course Number 28 at the Zimbabwe Staff College on the country's political environment last week.

He said former Vice President Joice Mujuru and her cabal had been misled in 2010 that they would take over power from President Mugabe.

As such, they started talking about the need to remove President Mugabe from power, claiming that he was old so that he would be replaced by "new blood".

"This was coming from old blood that had been with us all along, defining itself as new blood," said Prof Moyo.

". . . Some of them had been in Government since 1980 but were shamelessly presenting themselves as new blood. But you have been a Cabinet minister since 1980, so how are you new blood?

"This focus on succession politics became now the rallying point as it indeed is right now. It is the pre-occupation of even ill-informed or uninformed media of ours. They are all about succession politics.

"The difficulty they have is that the leader they seek to succeed scored an historic, emphatic electoral victory on the 31st of July 2013, unprecedented in our history as a country.

"We got an absolute majority in Parliament and the President got 62 percent of the vote."

Added Prof Moyo: "In any rational situation, it takes someone who is either suicidal or has amazing guts to try and seek to remove somebody who has just won an election with such commanding figure.

"You have got to be crazy. So you have people who are now pursuing an agenda, which is in fact at odds with the sentiment of the nation as expressed by the electorate.

"And this is the chief difficulty that they are constantly either avoiding or running away from. You really can't seek to remove somebody who has won an election with overwhelming numbers."

There are indications that Dr Mujuru and her cabal were plotting to oust President Mugabe, even through unprecedented actions like assassination.

Former secretary for administration Didymus Mutasa and former party spokesperson Rugare Gumbo allegedly said President Mugabe would be assassinated if he blocked Dr Mujuru's rise to Presidency at the party's 6th National People's Congress last December.

Another former politburo member, Nicholas Goche, reportedly approached some potential hitmen in South Africa and Israel to explore the possibility of the assassination.

Source - The Herald