Mthwakazi Republic Party Says Late VP Nkomo Partly To Blame For Gukurahundi
The Mthwakazi Republic Party (MRP) has said late Vice President Joshua Nkomo is partly to blame for the murder of some 20 000 mainly Ndebele-speaking people during Gukurahundi.
MRP says the massacres could have been avoided if Nkomo had accepted the proposal tabled during the Lancaster House talks of 1979 to split Zimbabwe into two countries.
Late President Robert Mugabe’s North Korean-trained 5th Brigade butchered civilians in the Midlands and Matabeleland provinces under the guise of searching for dissidents between 1983 and 1987.
Speaking at a rally in Khame, Plumtree, MRP president Mqondisi Moyo said the former ZAPU president, Nkomo, refused the offer as he thought he was going to win the country’s first one-man-one-vote election in 1980. NewZimbabwe.com cites him as saying:
I feel sad because we had the opportunity to separate ourselves from Zimbabwe during the Lancaster House talks of 1979 but the late Zapu leader Nkomo refused, he said he wanted the two countries combined because he thought he was going to win not knowing that Mugabe and his colleagues had finished with him.
Three years down the line, Ndebele people started being brutally murdered in the hands of Mugabe. If Nkomo had agreed to that option during the talks, there was not going to be a thing called Gukurahundi.
If only he had not called for a cease-fire in 1982, we were going to defeat Shonas once and for all. I always wonder why Nkomo took his ZPRA troops for training in Russia, Cuba, Algeria and Egypt only call for a cease-fire.
MRP is a political party pushing for reconstitution of the Mthwakazi nation through cessation from the greater Zimbabwe. Mthwakazi is the original Ndebele kingdom.