Fortune Charumbira, the Deputy President of the National Council of Chiefs, said that the ongoing initiative to address the Gukurahundi issue will succeed because it is being led by traditional leaders who have been mandated by President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
Charumbira made these remarks during the official launch of the Gukurahundi Community Outreach Programme at the Bulawayo State House on Sunday.
He claimed that previous national healing and reconciliation efforts to resolve the Gukurahundi issue had failed in the past because they were not “home-grown” and did not have the involvement of traditional leadership. Said Charumbira (via CITE):
I think we should remember that this is not the first initiative since independence to endeavour to resolve or put closure to the Gukurahundi issues.
Charumbira cited several previous initiatives that had failed to make meaningful progress in addressing the Gukurahundi issue, including the Chihambakwe Commission, the Gukurahundi Compensation Commission led by the late Johnson Mkandla, and the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC), among others.
Charumbira claimed that these past efforts, led by civil society and religious organisations, had failed because they tried to “copy how conflict was solved in other countries such as Cambodia, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela,” rather than utilising a home-grown, traditional approach. He said:
No, conflict resolution can only succeed sustainably if you use your knowledge, culture, values, and context.
This current one is led by traditional leaders and that’s very important. It respects our traditions, norms, and values.
There is a writer who said, “There is no country that has developed by abandoning its own culture, not even one.”
We want to thank the president for taking a route that works. We are misled to think that the best practice is an international practice.
For us to address this issue, we must approach it with best practices and we are the best practice, that’s why we are succeeding on this one, not foreign practices.
However, some stakeholders in the Matabeleland region remain sceptical about the prospects of success for the current initiative to address Gukurahundi.
They believe such efforts will not succeed as long as there is no accountability for the perpetrators of the atrocities.
The Mthwakazi Republic Party (MRP), for example, does not view Gukurahundi merely as a historical event, but rather as part of an ongoing “Grand Plan” of ethnic marginalisation targeted at the Ndebele people.
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