Tag: Matabeleland

Republic of Mthwakazi by 2018?

In a shock move Paul Siwela’s Matabeleland Liberation Organisation (MLO) has signed an agreement with an investment firm which deals in natural resources to set up and operate an oil, gas mining company in Matabeleland.

MLO signed the agreement on Tuesday with Kilimanjaro Capital Ltd which is based in the offshore-financial centre Belize City, following a year of talks.

Belize stands out as one of a dwindling number of “safe” tax havens where privacy and assets are respected for Anglo-American citizens.

Siwela is currently on the run after skipping bail just before he was due in court to hear whether treason charges against him and his colleagues stood.

He was charged with treason for allegedly planning a violent overthrow of the government.

In a Press release, Kilimanjaro Capital Ltd said the company would be jointly administered by Kilimanjaro Capital and the MLO.

Siwela said this marks MLO’s total take-over of all economic resources in Matabeleland.

“We are talking of taking over all economic resources in Matabeleland territory. Talks have been going on for more than a year and stand to change the economic face of Matabeleland and give economic resources back to the people of Matabeleland,” Siwela said in an e-mailed response.

Kilimanjaro Capital Ltd focuses on the acquisition, development and management of natural resource assets in Africa.

The company is listed on the Danish GXG Exchange and has obtained a secondary listing on the United States Over The Counter markets exchange as a foreign issuer.

Siwela added the agreement with Kilimanjaro would change the face of Matabeleland.

“The memorandum of agreement shall change the politics of Matabeleland forever and MLO is now taking over the affairs of Matabeleland and will not interfere with Zimbabwe. This means all businesses operating in Matabeleland must know the authority that must give them valid licences to operate in Matabeleland.

“We respect the Zimbabwean border and would not take anything over our borders. Zimbabweans would remain with their land and their government and we would not interfere with that as it is for Zimbabweans to sort their own problems,” he added.

Siwela’s MLO has been leading calls for a separate Matabeleland state saying the province was being sidelined from national development programmes.

MLO says a separate Matabeleland state is necessary to put an end to the marginalisation of the region which lags behind in development.

The 50-year-old Siwela, is thought to be domiciled in Sweden after skipping the country.

“Zimbabwe is a failed State and heading towards the abyss,” Siwela told the Daily News from self-imposed exile.

“It is for this and other reasons like gross abuse of human rights, corruption, Matabele genocide and lack of accountability and abuse of office by the government and failure to address Matabeleland political grievances that the current situation shall deliver the birth of the Republic of Matabeleland.”

Siwela together with Charles Thomas and John Gazi, former leaders of the Matabeleland Liberation Front, were arrested in 2011 on allegations of treason and attempting to subvert a constitutionally-elected government.

The trio distributed fliers calling on members of the public and the army to rise up against the government. The High Court has since acquitted Gazi but ruled that Thomas and Siwela have a case to answer.

Speaking to the Daily News, from his base yesterday, Siwela said: “The people of Matabeleland have been suffering discrimination since November 3, 1893 when the British colonial masters annexed the region.

“As if that was not enough, they further lost their independence and sovereignty and suffered genocide under President Robert Mugabe who has dismally failed and falsely projected himself as a pan-Africanist yet he is an anti-thesis of pan-Africanism.”

While not giving a time frame when the plan will likely be put into motion, Siwela said MLO intends to raise the national flag of the “Republic of Matabeleland” by 2018, claiming they have already penned a national anthem that is set to be sung during the inaugural hoisting of the flag.

He claimed Matabeleland and the Midlands provinces were ready for the so-called separation.

“At the moment, the agenda is to commit to the independence of our country,” he said.

“We have finished our constitution for the Republic of Matabeleland and we have our coat of arms as well.

“The people of Matabeleland have resolved to combine their efforts and work towards establishing their independence from Zimbabwe which is a colonial master being a successor to Rhodesia. Remember, there was no country called Zimbabwe before April 1980.”

Spelling out his ambitions for the new State, Siwela said they would recruit 30 000 civilians to form the Matabeleland Defence Force “to defend and protect our political integrity.”

He added: “We will have a 10 000-member police force, 3 000 correctional services, 1 000 civil servants that would include district, provincial and central government; some would be absorbed in the agriculture, mining, tourism services, a few parastatals and State-owned entities, industry and wildlife.”

Source: Harare24/Daily News

Mugabe: Mandela was great friend

Nelson Mandela with Joshua Nkomo
The disingenuous Mandela with Joshua Nkomo

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe described Nelson Mandela as a “great friend” and “a man of real principle”.

Mugabe was among many world leaders who attended the memorial service for Mandela at the FNB Stadium, in Johannesburg on Tuesday. On Wednesday he went to the Union Buildings, in Pretoria, to view Mandela’s body lying in state, Timeslive reported.

Mugabe denied that there had been differences between himself and Mandela. “I don’t know about any feud,” Mugabe said on his return to Harare.

“If anything, there was an alliance. We worked very well with him when he came out of prison. We gave him support.

“We established the principle of national reconciliation at independence in 1980. [South Africa] took it over and used it as a basis to create what [it now has, the] rainbow nation.

In the seven years leading to 1987 Mugabe had ordered the deaths of thousands of innocent Zimbabweans through a “special” brigade that reported directly to him. That unit, named the fifth brigade, trained by experts hired from North Korea, murdered thousands of Zimbabweans under the watch and directives of Robert Mugabe.

Robert Mugabe like Mandela – a tribal Xhosa – are minority leaders who prey on the peaceful nature and reluctance of people to live under chaos and violence.

The terrible wounds the Fifth Brigade inflicted on Matabeleland in the early 1980s still show. The countryside is under-populated, there is even less employment in the towns than there is in the rest of Zimbabwe, and people are scared to talk.

But ample evidence of some of the massacres carried out there between 1982 and 1986 exist. Followers of Mugabe’s rival, Joshua Nkomo, were killed in their thousands.

The Fifth Brigade, like Mr Mugabe’s government and administration, was mostly Shona-speaking. Matabeleland is populated mostly by Ndebeles, the descendants of Zulus who came to the area in the 1830s.

Many in Matabeleland describe the campaign of murder as genocide.

Joseph Buchena Nkatazo co-ordinated an investigation carried out some years ago by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace.

Mr Nkatazo says in the areas where they had been able to investigate, they had found evidence of more than 20,000 deaths. He was sure there must have been many more elsewhere.

Mandela knew about the massacres at the time, but never spoke out against them.

Mugabe only had praise for Mandela on Thursday. “From our point of view, we have lost a great friend, a revolutionary and a man of real principle. That’s why we went to give him a send-off so that we would be satisfied that the love we had for him, the historical alliance that we created in the fight against imperialism and colonialism, will not have been historically lost by our being absent,” Mugabe said.

Mugabe, who turns 90 in February, secured a seventh term in office in July.

The Zimbabwean leader received an applause on Tuesday at the Mandela memorial service, whereas President Jacob Zuma was booed.

Mugabe will not travel to Qunu, in Eastern Cape, for the burial at the weekend.