Maimane calls for Mugabe to step down

The Minister of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services, Dr Christopher Mushohwe has castigated the leader of South African opposition Democratic Alliance party, Mmusi Mmaimane, for calling on President Robert Mugabe to step down.

In a statement to the ZBC News, Dr Mushowe said an elementary knowledge of the genesis and growth of Apartheid in South Africa, and the subsequent trans-border expansion and entrenchment of white settler colonial interests in the rest of Southern Africa towards the close of the 19th century, will help the SADC region understand and situate an emerging, trans-border opposition narrative vainly agitating for a post liberation era in Southern Africa.

He said largely white-sponsored and driven, this brand of politics founds and fronts black opposition figures in the region, preferably those with previous association with liberation  movements, with trade union credentials or from religious movements to fawn native legitimacy and to inveigle voters who must be persuaded to view them as well–intentioned and home-grown or better still, as a natural and necessary development from politics and struggles of national independence waged in the region.

Dr Mushowe said it therefore comes as no surprise to the government of Zimbabwe that President Mugabe, himself a leading proponent of region-wide black economic empowerment, should be the natural target for the white-driven Democratic Alliance and the white adopted Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and jointly agitating for a post liberation era in Southern Africa.

The Minister also said on the contrary, all governments run by former liberation movements in Southern Africa are democratically elected by citizens of their respective countries.

Dr Mushowe also said these governments do not drive their legitimacy from the ‘say –so' serial electoral losers in the opposition, much less from the unsettled, historically- derived white interests which vainly think they can push the clock back.

He said today a liberated, post-Apartheid and democratic Southern Africa is an irreversible fact, and no amount of reading tired and retrogressive scripts from the tony Leons of this world  or from re-made new national parties, will challenge the new economic normal in Zimbabwe, or defeat the push towards the eventual goal of an economically liberated Southern Africa.