MDC Alliance leader Advocate Nelson Chamisa has demanded that government should compensate, Gukurahundi and the 2005 Operaration Murambatsvina victims.
The Opposition leader said this yesterday when he visited party activists Last Maengahama and Tungamirai Madzokere, who clocked eight years at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison for a murder charge which was quashed by the Supreme Court last week.
Maengahama and Madzokere were arrested in Glen View, Harare, in 2011 facing charges of killing a police officer, Petros Mutedza.
The MDC Alliance leader urged the government to apologize and compensate the families that lost their loved ones during the Gukurahundi and Operation Murambatsvina era saying that as a leader of the nation he had already apologized in Matabeleland whilst adding that Zimbabwe will still be divided if the government did not do anything to unite the nation.
“We must apologize to the victims and compensate for the victims of Gukurahundi. I apologised in Matabeleland when I went there because that’s what leaders do. A lot of people were harmed by Operation Murambatsvina and people’s pensions were eroded. A lot of people died in June 2008 and a country with angry people cannot prosper,” Chamisa said.
Commenting on the Mbuya Nehanda statue erected in Harare CBD last month, Chamisa refused to be against the remembrance of Zimbabwean heroes insisting that as a leader he paid tribute to the sons and daughters who sacrificed their lives for the attainment of Independence.
“Some said I attacked Mbuya Nehanda. Those who worked for our liberation are our heroes and national heroines. We respect them, but we don’t idolise them. We respect them and it ends there, we pray only to God.” He lamented that most youth in the country were turning to drugs.
The Gukurahundi was a series of massacres of largely ethnic Ndebele civilians in the midlands and Matabeleland areas from early 1983 to late 1987. The name derives from a Shona language term which loosely translates to “the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains” whilst Operation Murambatsvina also officially known as Operation Restore Order, was a large-scale Zimbabwean government campaign to forcibly clear slum areas across the country in 2005.
