The ruling party in Zimbabwe expelled one of its co-founders, veteran politician Edgar Tekere, for insulting President Robert Mugabe in a recently published autobiography, the state Sunday Mail reported.
A meeting of party leaders in Tekere’s home district of Manicaland, eastern Zimbabwe, ”unreservedly condemned” Tekere’s book, A Lifetime of Struggle, launched in Harare in January and selling briskly, according to the newspaper, a government mouthpiece.
It quoted provincial Zimbabwe African Nation Union Patriotic chairperson Tinaye Chigudu saying the autobiography ”clearly and explicitly denigrates and vilifies” Mugabe.
He said provincial leaders would not consider an appeal by Tekere.
Tekere (69) a former ruling party secretary general and long seen as a political maverick, left the party a decade ago to form a short-lived opposition group he called the Zimbabwe Unity Movement.
He said he founded that party to oppose corruption in Mugabe’s government. Last year he was granted readmission on condition he took no ruling party office for five years.
In his book, Tekere claimed Mugabe lacked charisma when they and a group of other political prisoners in the country, which was known as Rhodesia before 1980 independence, broke away from an existing liberation group, most of whose leaders were in jail, and founded what was to become the ruling party. He said Mugabe did not favour the split, contrary to official ruling party history that Mugabe led the schism.
But Tekere’s more personal accounts have angered the autocratic Mugabe, the country’s only leader since independence, and his close colleagues. Mugabe himself dismissed the autobiography as the work of an unbalanced mind.
Tekere, who like Mugabe was one of the architects of the seven-year guerrilla war that ended white colonial rule, insisted Mugabe was indecisive, ”weak” and had no military experience. The book strongly questioned Mugabe’s role in guerrilla operations and alleged he had been reluctant to flee to neighbouring Mozambique to join guerrilla commanders there after his 1974 release from prison.
He claimed that, at the time, neither Mozambique’s then-president, Samora Machel, nor Zimbabwean guerrilla chieftain General Josiah Tongogara trusted Mugabe and held the ascetic former school teacher in disdain. Machel later died in a plane crash and Tongogara was killed in a car wreck.
Mugabe was not liked by the presidents of independent countries in the region, known as the Frontline States, who supported the guerrilla war, helped train fighters and allowed them to set up rear bases on their territory to launch cross-border infiltration into the Zimbabwean bush, said Tekere’s book, a local best seller as Mugabe’s popularity plummets amid the nation’s worst political and economic crisis since independence.
Tekere said Mugabe was aloof and haughty and made no friends. He quoted his sister Sabina once remarking that if he had died ”we would have been unable to call out anybody as friends” for the funeral.
He said Mugabe had at least one illicit love affair during his marriage to his first wife, Sally, a Ghanaian, who died in 1992.
Mugabe later admitted two of his three children with his second wife, Grace, a former secretary in his office half his age, were conceived shortly before Sally’s death in accordance with African paternity and polygamous customs. Sally Mugabe had been made sterile by a kidney illness. – Sapa-AP