The Zanu PF youth league has defended suspended Harare youth leader Godwin Gomwe, claiming he was being purged for helping engineer the ouster of former Vice-President Joice Mujuru.
BY BLESSED MHLANGA
Gomwe is currently on bail on several charges including extorting over $46 000 from 10 housing cooperatives in Harare using First Lady Grace Mugabe’s name.
But speaking at a belated 21st Movement celebration at Mbizo Stadium in Kwekwe yesterday, Zanu PF Secretary for Youth Affairs Pupurai Togarepi claimed senior cabinet ministers and other alleged Mujuru sympathisers, still in the party structures, were fabricating charges against Gomwe.
“They are some people who don’t like the youth. We led the fight in removing the ‘Gamatox’ [and] now some are busy planning how to eliminate the youth who led that fight, one by one [they are] trying to destroy these youths,” Togarepi claimed.
He urged party bigwigs not to press any charges against youth leaders implicated in several scandals, alluding to the fact that by helping oust Mujuru, they should be forgiven.
“We don’t fight our own youths and believe we are saving the revolution,” Togarepi said. “But if we see a youth being asked to pay a fine because they fought gamatox or a matter that happened last year being pressed, we see the footprints of an enemy.”
Togarepi further accused President Robert Mugabe’s cabinet ministers of nepotism and shunning ruling party youths in the appointment of members of parastatal boards. He said some ministers were appointing MDC-T nominees and their family members to important boards while overlooking party supporters.
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“Some ministers, once they get official cars and security personnel, forget the party and you hear them saying we are government ministers and not for the party,” Togarepi said.
“When they appoint bosses, they appoint their family members [as] they go back to their rural areas to cherry-pick their own people and give them top jobs and even some MDC appointees — that should be stopped.”
Midlands Provincial Youth Chairman Edmore Samambwa said youths were behind the ouster of Mujuru and her allies after 10 provincial youth chairpersons and Togarepi met Mugabe and exposed a plot to topple him.
“After the initial meeting with President Mugabe, he called us all the youth chairmen to State House where we met the entire cabinet and he asked us to repeat all the allegations we had levelled against his ministers in their presence. We did that [and] this is why you see that nearly three quarters of those ministers were fired,” said Samambwa.
