‘We’ll grab Mutasa’s farms’

GRADUATES of the controversial National Youth Service (NYS) yesterday vowed to go ahead and grab farms belonging to former Presidential Affairs minister Didymus Mutasa after he dismissed their threats to punish him for questioning the legality of the Zanu PF December congress.

GRADUATES of the controversial National Youth Service (NYS) yesterday vowed to go ahead and grab farms belonging to former Presidential Affairs minister Didymus Mutasa after he dismissed their threats to punish him for questioning the legality of the Zanu PF December congress.

NQOBANI NDLOVU STAFF REPORTER

The NYS last week said grabbing farms belonging to Mutasa was befitting punishment for the former Zanu PF secretary for administration whom they condemned as a threat to the revolution.

Mutasa, however, dismissed the NYS graduates, popularly known as Border Gezi militias, as weevils who have no authority to grab his farms, but the latter told Southern Eye yesterday that they would prove the former minister wrong.

“We have been monitoring him and we will prove him otherwise,” NYS graduates association spokesperson Calvern Chitsunge told Southern Eye yesterday.

“We will take those farms.

“It won’t be long before we do that.

“His days of owning those farms are numbered.”

In a chilling warning, Chitsunge said they did not need authority from Zanu PF to repossess the farms as they were not members of the party, but just affiliates.

“We do not need authority from Zanu PF because we are not Zanu PF members, but just affiliates,” he said. “Whether he is fired from Zanu PF or not, our position is that we are correcting the wrongs that he did. He acquired his farms unprocedurally, some of which he parcelled to his regime-change followers.”

Mutasa has questioned the legality of Zanu PF’s congress where he and other party officials, including then Vice-President Joice Mujuru were pushed aside. He has attracted angry insults from President Robert Mugabe and others.

The former minister faces dismissal from Zanu PF after he penned a strongly worded statement insisting that democratic processes were deliberately pushed aside by Mugabe to promote members of the rival Emmerson Mnangagwa faction.

The former Zanu PF secretary for administration criticised First Lady Grace Mugabe, whom he labelled as a divisive element in Zanu PF, before questioning Mugabe’s complicit stance.

Grace, described as an atomic bomb by Mnangagwa for pushing aside Mujuru and her perceived allies, now sits on a disciplinary committee that was set up last week to deal with Mutasa’s case.