RETIRED Air Commodore, Mike Kara-kadzai — the man who was part of the strategists behind President Robert Mugabe’s electoral victory last month — will be buried at the National Heroes Acre today, Zanu PF secretary for administration Didymus Mutasa said yesterday.
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Karakadzai, who was also the National Railways of Zimbabwe general manager, died last week in a road accident near Shangani mine turn, on his way to Bulawayo.
Mutasa said the burial of Zanu PF founder Enos Nkala and former Minister of Agriculture Kumbirai Kangai will be announced in due course.
“Dates for the burial of Nkala and Cde Kangai will be announced later,” said Mutasa.
Nkala died in Harare last week while Kangai passed on yesterday.
During the liberation war, Karakadzai played a crucial role in mass mobilisation and setting up Zanu PF structures.
He was to continue with that role of re-organising the party even after independence.
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“He played a key role behind the scenes to ensure that Zanu PF won in the just-ended elections. In 2008, he was there when the party was facing defeat at the hands of the MDC-T and Karakadzai was instrumental in President Mugabe’s victory in the runoff,” an insider said.
But party spokesperson Rugare Gumbo told The Standard yesterday that Karakadzai was an ordinary member of the party who “was assisting in the commissariat department”.
The commissariat department has retired army and intelligence officers notably retired Air Marshal Henry Muchena and Sydney Nyanhongo, a former Central Intelligence Organisation director (internal).
The involvement of former officers from the military in Zanu PF’s commissariat department was seen by some members as the militarisation of the party’s structures in preparation for a takeover by members of the Joint Operations Command in the event that President Mugabe resigns or was incapacitated.
Gumbo said Zanu PF had conferred hero status on Karakadzai because of his role in the liberation struggle, the Air Force of Zimbabwe and later at NRZ where he did a superb job.
“He died while he was re-organising the National Railways of Zimbabwe,” Gumbo said.
This is despite the fact that NRZ workers are still to be paid their monthly salaries for the past 11 months while the struggling parastatal splashed top-of-the-range cars for executives.
As for Nkala, who died on Wednesday, few would shed a tear for him, especially in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces for his role in the Gukurahundi massacres where an estimated 20 000 were butchered by the North Korea-trained Fifth Brigade.
As Minister of Defence, Nkala was blamed for the atrocities as his utterances fuelled the killings.
In one of his utterances published by The Chronicle newspaper in 1985, Nkala called for the wiping away of the PF Zapu leadership.
Nkala would blow hot and cold especially after leaving government in 1989 following the Willowgate scandal where chefs would buy cars at low prices and resell them at higher prices. At one point, he attacked President Mu-gabe and Zanu PF, only to make a u-turn months later.
After meeting President Mugabe in May last year, Nkala told The Standard that Mugabe was the glue that held the country together.
Nkala said he was not sure whether he would still sing the “Mugabe must go” hymn he was singing before meeting him.
“It’s easy for people to say Mugabe must go, Mugabe must go, but most of them do not know that he is the glue that has been holding this country together,” Nkala said.
Nkala said people in the army, civil service, police and intelligence were the ones who fought for the liberation war, and hence they could not be divorced from the politics of the country. Some months later, he was singing from a different hymn sheet.
“While our army was born and built from two liberation armies, Zipra and Zanla, they must obey the people’s wishes and accept the leader chosen should we have elections soon,” Nkala told a local daily.
This was after he was told that some army generals had said they would not salute anyone without liberation war credentials in remarks aimed at MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
