By Eddie ZvinonzvaHARARE – Former Presidential Affairs minister Didymus Mutasa made a surprise appearance in public on Thursday evening at the launch of veteran nationalist and former Midlands Provincial Governor Cephas Msipa’s book In Pursuit of Freedom and Justice: A Memoir in Harare on Thursday evening.
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| Didymus Mutasa |
Mutasa, who was fired, along with former Vice President Joice Mujuru from both his government and party posts late last year on allegations of plotting to assassinate and oust President Robert Mugabe, was last seen in public when he attended Parliament way back in February.
That was before Zanu PF wrote to Parliament withdrawing all legislators it had fired from the party.
The former Zanu PF secretary for administration has of late been associated with People First, an outfit led by Mujuru.
Mutasa, for years a confidant of President Robert Mugabe, has openly said the fact that the post-congress Zanu PF was bitterly divided could be blamed on both Mugabe’s failure to name a successor, as well as his “choice to listen to liars”
The former Headlands legislator’s People First is mooting a coalition with the Morgan Tsvangirai-led Movement of
Democratic Change which has rattled Mugabe and the post-congress Zanu PF. The ruling party has failed to find
solutions that will “extricate crisis-weary Zimbabweans from the jaws of poverty that they have been placed in by Zanu PF’s rotten policies”.
“We are in a very sad state and it is really worse for people in the rural areas who have no dollar to buy bread. They are placed in the worst economic conditions imaginable.
“There is nothing these people can expect from this government but to wait for the rain, and even when the rains come, few have the seed. I would like the government to announce something that gives people hope, but they are just fighting among themselves. The situation is untenable,” Mutasa said recently.
Resultantly and obviously so, Mutasa said, Zimbabwe — formerly viewed as the bread basket of southern African — was now a basket case and a net importer of food, with at least 1,5 million people in dire need of food aid.
Also in attendance at the event were luminaries from the literary arts sector, politicians — among them ex-Zanu PF spokesperson Rugare Gumbo, former diplomat and renowned academic George Payne Kahari — Angeline Kamba, wife of the first black vice chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe the late Walter Kamba, among many others. Daily News
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