State House is far, says Mnangagwa - Interview Part 2

Q: Why can't the many "solid" cadres you talk about be like Mugabe? Iron sharpens iron, isn't it?
A: I don't know what that means, iron sharpens iron, that is English language. But I can say that most of us who have worked together in the last 40 years - in Government I can count them on my fingers - the majority were in the army. The current army commanders were very young at the time, and I can guarantee you that there is nobody in the army who is of our generation. Those who are heading the military now were junior officers during the struggle because all their commanders have either died or retired.

But the young people who are now in the leadership follow the footsteps of the President. They admire him and are committed to him both in terms of loyalty and perseverance, and they will uphold what we call "the revolutionary correct line".

There are also colleagues in the leadership that I am hundred percent sure will continue to identify the correct line of the revolution and follow it. And the correct line is "where we ought to go", because there is a difference between "where we want to go" as a nation and "where we ought to go". A leader must not take the people where they want to go, but where they ought to go, whether the people or the leader want it or not, or whether it is hard or not.

Q: The Zanu-PF Government has been in power for 35 years. Would you say it has put systems in place that can be carried forward by the next generation, when the current leaders retire?
A: To instil a culture of commitment and the upholding of the values of our revolution into the people, we had initially introduced a Youth Service to preach and teach patriotism to our youth. But down the line, we did not have the resources to sustain the programmes at the Youth Service centres. We felt that every child, as they grew up in this country, should put the country first and their personal interests second.

We felt that the best method was to introduce the Youth Service where when our children had reached secondary-level education, they would go and be taught the elements of patriotism. That as a nation we are where we are today because we have stood up and are ready to shed our blood for what we believe is ours. And that we must, day and night, remain masters of our destiny and masters of our resources. And we must preserve our God-given resources for ourselves and generations to come, and that anybody who wants to participate in our resources must come on our terms. That is the culture we are preaching.

But you are asking: Are we satisfied that the future generations will be able to carry on with the spirit of the revolution? We believe that they will, that for the foreseeable future we shall lie quietly in our graves. Else we may wake up from our graves if they fail to teach or continue with the resolute spirit we are imparting to them

At the moment, we are pursuing a two-pronged approach: one, to bring back our Youth Service programmes, and two, to change the curriculum in our schools so that the history of the revolution is taught and taught well. I went to school in China between 1963 and 1964, and we were taught about the Chinese Revolution, and up to this day Chinese schools still teach about the Chinese Revolution. As a result, the majority of the Chinese people today are very loyal to their country. This is because they begin at an early age to inculcate patriotism into them.

We also believe that if we introduce our revolutionary history into schools, it will help the nation to appreciate where we have come from, who we are, where we are going, and why we should continue to be who we are. It will help them to know that other nations are proud of themselves and there is no time when a British or American child ever aspires to be a Zimbabwean. In the same vein, we should also not have our children aspiring to be Americans, Indians, Chinese, and so on. They should aspire to be themselves. If we have that gravitas, then we, the current generation in the leadership, can rest well in our graves.

Q: But the commitment of the youth of today is not the same as the commitment of the youth of the 1960s. You have talked about catching them young, but what about those who are already out of school and working. How can you whip up their fervour to become committed citizens?
A: Well, the generation out of school is in-between the generation in school and our generation that was directly involved in the liberation struggle. In the 1960s, our leaders decided that we must take up arms, and the youth were very enthusiastic to go to war. We had nothing to lose at the time. We had no wives and no property. The only property we had was the clothes we wore.

Now the generation out of school have wives and children; they have homes and mortgages, so to tell them to sacrifice and die for the nation (laughs), they think twice. In fact, resources are our constraint, but our goal is really to catch them young.

Q: I promised earlier to take you back to Zambia, but let's start with your personal life. Your totem is Shumba, which means a lion, yet your nickname is Ngwena, meaning crocodile, given to you when you were a youthful activist. How did it come about?
A: During the revolution, we did not ask ourselves about our totems because we didn't want people to say so and so is my uncle, so and so is my auntie, and so on. So there were no totems during the revolution. That is number one.

Number two: We did not want comrades to be called by their proper names. When you arrived at the training camps, we had what we called "three check-ups". I was the head of the security department and, through the "three check-ups", we recorded the proper names of new comrades in our books, but we also gave them revolutionary names. And those were the names they were called throughout the struggle.

Now these revolutionary names were neutral as to one's totem and one's area of origin. So during the war, nobody knew that I was a Shumba. But because of the things we were doing, I was given the name Ngwena.

Of course we had what we called the Crocodile Group in 1964. The group came about when 11 youthful comrades assembled in the house of Rev Ndabaningi Sithole in Old Highfield in Harare. We had come back from China, and on reflection now, I find that Rev Sithole liked people from his home area. He wanted the 11 comrades to engage in some "action", at that stage it was more of sabotage than armed struggle. Out of the 11, some of us had had military training, others had not.

So we were split into two groups to cause sabotage, to set up roadblocks, to kill whites, destroy property, and so on. So we called our group the Crocodile Group. We were six in our group, but we split four to two. And it was at Chikuku, a place after Bikita but before Birchenough Bridge in Manicaland where the first white man was killed at Nyanyadzi. I was the commander of the other group while Comrade Ndangana commanded the group of four. This group was called the Crocodile Group. This is how my nickname Ngwena came about.

Q: Finally, the Rhodesians got you and your group?
A: Finally we were captured. At the time all my colleagues were above 21 years old. I was below 21. The age of majority then was 21, not 18 as it is today. That is how I escaped the death penalty. They charged us with undergoing foreign military training. I had done my first military training in Egypt then under President Abdel Gamal Nasser at the Heliopolis Military Academy.

But in 1963, there was a split back home in Zimbabwe in the ranks of the revolutionary party, Zapu. We had been sent to Egypt for military training by Zapu, but just when we were beginning the training, differences within Zapu led to a split and the formation of Zanu.

We were 13 students in Egypt, and when the split occurred, I wrote a letter home, as the head of the students in Egypt, saying we support "the rebels". Mugabe and his colleagues who had formed Zanu were called rebels at the time. So Joshua Nkomo who was the president of Zapu sent the late James Chikerema, the late Vice President Musika, Arnold Sibanda and David Mpongo to come to Cairo to discipline us for what I had done.

When they came, they said, "who is Emmerson?" So I stood up. Msika was the one interrogating. When I stood up, he said in Shona: "And he is so tiny!" Interestingly, out of the 13 students in Egypt, 11 including myself supported Zanu, the new group formed by Mugabe, Leopold Takawira and Enos Nkala. The two students who supported Nkomo and Zapu were from Bulawayo, Nkomo's home area. So training could not continue. The two students were then sent to America for studies.

But the 11 of us were sent back to Tanganyika on Mugabe's instructions. When we arrived in Tanganyika, out of the 11 students, 6 refused to go for further training, so they came back to Rhodesia. Five of us were then sent to China for military training. We were the first people to go to China in 1963 from the new Zanu party.

Q: Does your nickname Ngwena, Crocodile, have any bearing on your closeness to the other Crocodile, Gushungo?
A: No, no. We didn't even know that Mugabe's totem was Gushungo. He was just our boss, our commander. We didn't ask him about his totem. We only discovered much later that he too was a crocodile. Gushungo means crocodile.

After independence, I once joked with President Mugabe. He came to Gweru, the capital of my home area. So I said to him, "Mr President, you know I am a Shumba, a lion, and there is a lions' park in Gweru where you can walk with the lions in the morning until 11 am when it becomes unsafe because the lions become a bit hungry." In the history of the park, there has been only one incident when a lion ate the arm of a man. So I told the President: "It is now 9 am, I want us to go and walk with the lions, but don't be afraid because I am a Shumba, a lion."

Was the President amused? He waited till he came to the podium to give his speech and then told the people: "Mr Mnangagwa has asked me, because he is a lion himself, to go with him and walk with the lions here. Since I am the President, I am inviting him to come and swim with my crocodiles at Kutama. If he comes out alive, then I will walk with his lions." You can see that he did not take up my offer (laughs heartily).

Q: The two of you are called crocodiles, and we know the strength of the crocodile as an animal. Do your nicknames have a bearing on the strength of your personalities?
A: Honestly, I cannot interrogate the nickname given to me. Those who gave it thought it was important. But for President Mugabe, it is his totem. He is a Gushungo which means crocodile. For me it is a nickname arising from the Crocodile Group. We blew up bridges and at one time a locomotive train. And I was the ringleader.

But you know the trait of a crocodile, don't you? It never hunts outside water. It always goes into the water to catch its prey. It never goes in the villages or in the bush looking for food. It strikes at the appropriate time. So a good guerrilla leader strikes at the appropriate time. That's the import of the nicknames we gave each other.

Q: You spent 10 years at the Harare Central and Khami Prisons. . . ?
A: And in other prisons too. I was in Salisbury Prison (now Harare Central), then at Fort Victoria, and Gray Prison in Bulawayo, and finally at Khami Maximum Prison.

Q: And when you were released, you were deported to Zambia, even though you were a Zimbabwean. How was that possible?
A: I was a Zimbabwean, but they had to release me into the hands of my parents who were in Zambia.

Q: Now let's talk about the economy. Things are not going so well despite the country's huge stock of natural resources. Why?
A: If you look at the history of our economy, you will see that from the time we became independent we had economic growth up to the time we decided to take back our land from the white farmers. We were registering growth on a yearly basis, because we were abiding by the agreement we reached at Lancaster House in 1979, where we said for 10 years we shall not legislate for land acquisition. So from 1980 to 1990, we did totally nothing on the land.

However, in 1988 I was transferred from the Department of National Security to the Ministry of Justice, and my brief from the President was that I should begin drafting legislation to take land after the expiration of the 10-year moratorium. So in 1992, we passed the first piece of legislation, the Land Acquisition Act, but it was a weak one because we only attempted to remove the Lancaster House provision of "willing seller, willing buyer". It was a bad provision as the "willing seller" was selling land at a price of his choice and in a currency of his choice.

So during that time it was very difficult to acquire land from the whites for redistribution. We therefore reached a stage where we said the government should acquire land by paying only for the development on the land, but not for the land itself. The land issue was the major grievance of the liberation war. But as we were getting nowhere with the policy of gradualism, we decided to ditch the Lancaster House provision.

We then discovered that there was no formula in history for getting back our land; other nations just grabbed it and then wrote about it after the event. So we decided to take back our land in 2000. People may think that the people of Svosve who started it, did it on their own. No, it was the party which decided that the time had come to take back the land. GO TO LAST PAGE,  , GO TO FIRST PAGE.


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