Chamisa disbanded MDC militia?

Nelson Chamisa's MDC yesterday claimed it has disbanded a youth-led outfit called The Order of the Vanguard (Vanguard).

Describing it as "an otherwise peaceful and disciplined team of MDC youths", Lovemore Chinoputsa, the secretary-general of the MDC Youth Assembly, said the Vanguard "has since been disbanded on the orders of the national council, the party's supreme decision-making body in between congresses."

This comes after service chiefs that testified at the ongoing Motlanthe Commission of Inquiry arrogated responsibility of the August 1, shootings that claimed six lives to the outfit.

Chinoputsa claimed the Vanguard was disbanded soon after the "unfortunate incidences" of intra-party violence in Buhera at the burial of the late MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who died on Valentines Day.

"The Vanguard was a team of youths that went about peaceful drills at party events but was misinterpreted by political detractors as a violent outfit. On the orders of the party leadership, the Vanguard was disbanded. What is missed is that the Vanguard was not a terrorist or military term but rather it is leftist diction that refers to ideologically correct party cadres. In any case, the Vanguard was not an armed outfit," he said.
Meanwhile, former MDC MP Gabriel Chaibva returned Tuesday to haunt his erstwhile colleagues through sensational claims they armed some party youths to kill two people during the August 1 post-electoral violence.

Chaibva was making submissions before the Kgalema Motlanthe chaired Commission of Inquiry into the violence that rocked Harare's CBD soon after the July 30 elections.

The disturbances led to the shock gunning down of six civilians by what is widely believed to be soldiers who were deployed to quell the violence.

"It is my consideration that the events of the 1st of August 2018 were clearly engineered by the MDC to produce the kind of result that it had.

"They were not looking for anything short of dead bodies and they thought they would cause a lot of violence," said the now leader of the Free and Fair Foundation.

Said the founding MDC legislator for Harare South, "As a foundation, we were able to account for the death of three people, our informant says he was there.

"The MDC youths had a pistol. These youths, in their excitement, were taking turns to fire the pistol and it accidentally discharged and shot two of them and they quickly grabbed them, took them to Parirenyatwa (hospital) and dumped them there."

His claims come a day after Defence Forces commander, General Philip Valerio Sibanda also tried to distance his troops from the widely condemned killings.



Chaibva broke ranks with the then Arthur Mutambara led MDC faction following a storm over his controversial decision to attend then President Robert Mugabe's inauguration after a violent and strongly disputed poll 2008.

He immediately became a ready resource for state media journalists who were seeking for comment on the main opposition's shortcomings with the excitable businessman often using the free television airtime to excoriate his former allies.

Chaibva then went into a somewhat lengthy media hiatus only to return Tuesday to claim the MDC Vanguard was a reincarnation of another former party militia group christened the "Democratic Resistance Committee (DRC)".

"Unknown to us, sometime in 2002, the MDC had formed what they called the Democratic Resistance Committee (DRC), a group that was being trained militarily and soon some white farmers began to share spaces on their farms to train these youths and this training was being led by Roy Bennett (late ex-MP)," he said.

"The DRC that I have talked about has morphed into the Vanguard. Anyone who underestimates the nature of the militancy of the MDC does so at their own peril."

The MDC however denies this with party youth assembly secretary general Lovemore Chinoputsa Tuesday saying the controversial group was "peaceful" and was disbanded just before the July 30 elections.