Zimbabwe leader’s loyalists make surprise break with Mugabe

Mawarire who is now in South Africa, says his protests are peaceful and target government corruption, police brutality and delays in salary payments.

They vowed to boycott the Heroes Day celebrations in August.

At the national headquarters, Chipanga told them that the Ministry of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing headed by the party’s national political commissar Saviour Kasukuwere had allocated them 1,000 hectares on the periphery of Harare and Norton town 40 km to the west. “They are not part of us as we try to live together”, he said, to applause from supporters.

Perhaps most significant of all, was the declaration by these war veterans that they’ll no longer support Mugabe in elections which are due in 2018.

“I think they (Zanu PF) have proved to us over the last couple of years that it will be a hard task for them to deliver those things”, Mawarire said. The veterans are known for unleashing violence on those opposing the government.

The protests caught on with Zimbabweans exhausted of long years of state-sponsored-violence, crippling poverty and high unemployment in the country. Banks have run short of cash and the government struggles to pay civil servants. The economic hardship been exacerbated by the worst drought in decades wiping out crops.

The #ThisFlag movement has been propelled by a generation of social media-savvy Zimbabweans who organized protest actions on messaging and web apps, analysts say.

“Regrettably, the general citizenry has previously been subjected to this inhuman and degrading treatment without a word of disapproval from us”, the veterans’ statement said of the incident.

Taking an anti-government stand in the country can be risky in Zimbabwe.

A member of the ZRP who doesn’t want to be named contacted us Via FB 2 return @PastorEvanLive’s lost Bible.

“We are not backing down any more”, Mawarire told the cheering crowd outside the court, many of them holding candles and draped with the Zimbabwean flag.

On Friday, Mawarire posted a video assuring people he was safe after a truck of unidentified men showed up at his house looking for him.

Mawarire left the country last week but has denied reports he fled to seek asylum elsewhere.

“This is a major development in the political landscape of the country considering that the war veterans have been campaigning and supporting the Mugabe regime for the past 36 years”, Eldred Masunungure, a political science professor at the University of Zimbabwe in the capital, Harare, said Friday by phone.

“Pastors don’t rule the country”.

“What we are advocating for, more than anything else, is a government that respects the dignity of its citizens”, he said, adding that his campaign would never be hijacked by politicians because it belonged to the people.