Members of the ZANU PF War Veterans League have advised opposition political parties to forget about political power, saying their desires were misguided.
Speaking at the party headquarters in Harare during a strategic meeting for the league’s national executive on Friday 30 September 2022, Douglas Mahiya branded the opposition as puppets who were bent on reversing the gains of the liberation struggle. The Herald cites him as saying:
The question of power is not what we should be talking about as Zimbabweans, because the country got the political power from the colonisers.
We got that political power. We were the force behind getting that political power. So any political party that is going to discuss about the desire for political power is misguided.
What opposition political parties should do is to contribute towards economic development, because this is the stage of the revolution in which we are and that way it will be acceptable. Not political power.
No one in this country will ever expect the war veterans to accept anything rather than what we achieved. So we are going to defend that power. We have no option because that is what we yielded out of our own sacrifices.
Mahiya speaks as Zimbabwe is headed towards the 2023 harmonised elections which some analysts believe will be chaotic as intraparty and interparty violence has been escalating in the southern African country in recent months.
This is not the first time War Veterans vowed to guard against a change of power, they made similar remarks in previous elections.
In the past, War Veterans together with state security forces were used by the ruling ZANU PF to intimidate the opposition
Meanwhile, the United Nations Human Rights Office, OHCHR, this year expressed concern over the recurrence of disputed elections in Zimbabwe increasing the probability that the southern African country’s 2023 elections will be supervised by the international body.