Mthwakazi fires spokesperson

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SECCESSIONIST Mthwakazi Liberation Front (MLF) faces collapse amid reports it has fired its spokesperson, David Magagula, hardly a month after its Botswana-based leader General Nandinandi (Fidelis Ncube) stepped down.

SECCESSIONIST Mthwakazi Liberation Front (MLF) faces collapse amid reports it has fired its spokesperson, David Magagula, hardly a month after its Botswana-based leader General Nandinandi (Fidelis Ncube) stepped down.

by KHANYILE MLOTSHWA

Magagula was reportedly axed for insurbodination, while Ncube was ordered to step down after the Botswana government complained that as a Tswana citizen, he could not continue being actively involved in party politics outside its borders.

MLF vice-president Churchill Guduza recently wrote to Magagula informing him of his expulsion from the party “following a concerted consultation with other key members of this important organisation”.

“It is in this light thereof that you are instructed to hand over, within one week, to the secretary-general the laptop that was allocated to you pursuant of your responsibilities within this important organisation,” Guduza said in the statement.

Magagula’s alleged crimes included policy violations, violation of constitutional principles and insurbodination. “You (Mr David Magagula) failed to submit yourself to MLF’s principles and your unbecoming behaviour of sitting down for the purpose of planning, conspiring, conniving, mapping and strategising against the movements’ objectives, organs, committees and or members without following the movement’s procedures has culminated in gross misconduct thereby,” Guduza said.

“After the meeting held with Botswana authorities in Gaborone recently, which informed the decision of the MLF President to step down, you were instructed to disseminate a statement to that effect signed by both the vice-president and secretary-general of the MLF. But instead of carrying out that instruction, which marked a very sad day of the stepping down of the president in the history of the MLF, you connived and conspired in the form of defeating the purpose of the MLF.”

Magagula has been accused of issuing his own statement “which violated the principles of the organisation”.

“The statement that you issued was in the form of an interview with a faceless person in the name of a Mackay Tshuma, in which all the peaceful gains of the MLF under the leadership of General Nandinandi (Fidelis Ncube) were ridiculed and undermined with impunity,” Guduza said.

“In your purported interview with the faceless journalist (Mackay Tshuma), you touched on very sensitive information of the MLF, which included the Chitawa Declaration, internal meetings of the organisation and a range of others that included the attendance of the commemoration of the Battle of Isandlwana at which the president of the MLF formally presented a gift to the King of the Zulu nation, King Goodwill Zwelithini.”