Former cabinet minister and leader of the opposition Zapu party Dumiso Dabengwa has dismissed President Emmerson Mnangagwa’ new dispensation as being no different from the administration of his predecessor, former president Robert Mugabe. Speaking at an event organised by pressure group Ibhetshu Likazulu to mark Gukurahundi on Unity Day, Dabengwa lamented the fact that the perpetrators responsible for the Gukurahundi massacres are in charge of State power, while the victims are yet to find closure. Said Dabengwa:
We continue to suffer silently, we continue to live in fear and the same crocodiles that devoured our people are still in power, they recently changed faces and names, the system and the attitudes simply mutated yet remain the same.
We have continued to suffer in silence simply because those who butchered our people, maimed our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, raped our sisters and mothers destroyed our property are in charge of State power and they continue to frustrate every effort that we make to express the pain and grief that we are harbouring within ourselves
Gukurahundi did not only leave permanent scars nor did it end by the signing of the Unity Accord, it simply mutated from being direct violence into structural and systematic violence underpinned by grossly centralised system of governance that is grotesquely corrupt and self-serving, characterised by gross marginalisation of the same communities that were affected by Gukurahundi.
Thousands of our people were never accounted for, they lie in mass graves scattered around the country and their families have lived in trauma for the past 35 years, seeking closure but being denied every opportunity for truth recovery and transitional justice.
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