Theme: An injury to one is an injury to all Venue: Hillbrow Theatre Presented By: Mtwakazi Liberation Front

1.Honourable VP 2.Honorable Chair 3.Honourable NEC members here present 4.Honourable Mthwakazi members here present 5.Honourable representatives from other pro - Mthwakazi organizations here present 6.Ladies and gentlemen 7.Comrades and friends We gather here today to give our solidarity to those of us who will be in the Zimbabwean courts as from tomorrow the 23rd of April 2012,facing charges of trying to overthrow the government of Zimbabwe - which is a treasonous act under the law of that country and punishable by death-an old and archaic law inherited from the colonial government. As we are gathered here, we think of messiers Paul Siwela, Charles Thomas, John Gazi who are facing the serious charge of capital punishment. We implore that the flyers that were found in their possession, which are the ones that it is assumed were carrying the message which is alleged to have been inciting the citizens to rise against the government were part of an ongoing program of conscetising our people to come together as a collective and support the calls and concerns of our people which are a cornerstone to our livelihood as a people. The so called offensive flyers were not offensive as they will remain not offensive. The flyers were and are telling the truth and whose truth is known by the affected Mthwakazi peoples not some subjects who have long deep seated and ingrained traits of subjecting Mthwakazi people to a perpetual life of servitude and some numerous injustices that cannot be cited here because of time. The meaning of the important messages on those flyers cannot be detected to us by those who are not from Mthwakazi and who do not understand the dynamics of the language that has been viewed as belonging to the second class peoples of Zimbabwe. It is also worthwhile to mention the Hon Moses Mzila, a Member of Parliament who is also the Minister in the Organ of National Healing, which, in essence is supposed to heal the people and help in the reconciliation process, but to make a smokescreen of that, he was arrested and is set to continue attending court prosecution. We wonder why then were this Ministry ever created if it is not allowed to address those injustices by mentioning them and then discussing them too in public domain. The state has not prepared a docket up to now. Ironically, arresting and detaining Hon Mzila should in itself have made the President of Zimbabwe invoke his unlimited powers to instruct the law enforcement agents to lay down reasons for his arrest before hastily doing what they did. You should have mentioned movements fighting for justice on Gukurahundi, the ICC, the fact that Gukurahundi was classified as a genocide last year, the fact that Mzila was within his rights to address people of Silwane on Gukurahundi as a shallow grave had been discovered by primary school children in which the skulls and human bones were protruding from the earth. We have Esau Ncube, who was arrested for demanding that jobs in Vic Falls be given to locals as a first preference. Owen Maseko, an artist was also arraigned to the courts for drawing pictures on Gukurawundi , which has been so far accorded the rightful classification, that of being regarded as genocide by the ICC. Styx Mhlanga a musician also found himself in the courts because of Mthwakazi sentiment that he had said. Father Marko Mnkandla, who also is facing a charge for talking about Gukurawundi and being a church minister, was also within his limits to address people on peace and national healing. The church plays a pivotal role in these cases. These are a few cases that we are citing which makes us say rally behind all those who face charges for the cause of Mthwakazi. In all fairness, is it a lie to talk about Gukurawundi? Did Gukurawundi not take place? Why did they indulge in the heinous act of Gukurawundi if they knew it was wrong? We will not be silenced and this means we will all be jailed for demanding that our children must know what they did to us. We want a recourse now rather than later. Some desperate calls by the Zimbabwean President on the Independence Day that they did wrongs to the people are coming rather late. Why is that coming now? He did not state how that will be dealt with. It was an empty rhetoric designed to hoodwink the public especially the people from Mthwakazi. We call upon the regime to halt forth with the dehumanizing treatment of those Mthwakazi people because what they were doing was not coming from their egos but they were fronting the calls of many Mthwakazi people. The tactics the regime is using is of trying to silence the people so that they view the ideology as treasonous but in essence they are feigning the hatred and more calls coming from all quarters of Mthwakazi. The people of Mthwakazi, we are gathered here to show solidarity are not the only ones facing the brutality of a regime whose fortune is waning, but we have numerous examples to point. In essence, all what is being done to Mthwakazi people is an implementation of what their 1979 grand plan says and this grand plan has never been denied by the regime which makes it a reality that they crafted it, lest we forget the subsequent additions/reviews that they have continuously brought to the open. The regime is trying by all means to suppress the voices from the concerned. We as the affected will never stop talking about what affects us. What the regime is doing is only seasoning the people so that they defend what they believe in and also motivating them to group and call in unison for cessation of arrests and address the problems. If we may briefly account for some telling vivid actions of the regime from the time zanu came into being, in 1963,coming in as a tribal entity with a few disgruntled Mthwakazi people, they instigated the fight that took place in Mgagao and Morogoro where about 88 freedom fighters died, the problems that they caused in Zambia which led them to be expelled and they had to seek bases in Tanzania and Mozambique, they caused the failure of bringing together the liberation movements’ merge under patriotic front banner, some freedom fighters deployed in Mozambique to work alongside zanla (during the liberation era) they were never tracked because they were either eliminated or out rightly eliminated as they were deployed in small numbers whereas they were in multitudes which then made it difficult for them to defend themselves from the comrades they were supposed to work hand in glove. This is just pointing out how skillful they are in silencing what they believe to be dissenting voices out to disturb their grasp to power. In Biblical terms as well as in any other terms, no people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want to belong to. This is a topical issue in Zimbabwe nowadays, albeit done in different ways. The emerging voices in Mthwakazi have and are talking about issues that affect them in their daily lives. Those issues cannot be left unattended to by those affected as they are there to guarantee us stable political and economic freedom that we have not enjoyed since the so called independence from the colonial entity that existed. The idea should not be limited to calls and narrations only, but there is a need for a vigorous collective drive by all the Mthwakazi people from different recognizable formations that matter in the present political sphere in the country. This day, has relevance in that we as a people, have sought to come together irrespective of our political affiliations and ideologies, to call for an end to intimidation and harassment of our people. We know that promotion of a certain tribal educational advancement in all spheres of development is still taking place, that history is seriously distorted and tilted in favour of Zanu-PF, that there is a serious and concerted de-industrialization of Matabeleland, that Zambezi pipeline will remain a pipedream as long as Zanu-PF presides over Mthwakazi, that double favours are a birth right to a certain tribe in the country and this is glaringly done to utter disgust of the Mthwakazi peoples. These and more issues about us, once talked about, as we do, warrant a treasonous act back in Zimbabwe. In conclusion, we all in unity, call upon the powers that be, in Zimbabwe and the international community to intervene and halt all these human right abuses that are an order of the day in the present Zimbabwe. The UN statutes should be enforced on any country without favour or fear. Our calls should not fall on deaf ears. We want all the injustices attended to as a matter of urgency. We as a nation will not remain silent and watch while our kin and kith are de-humanized but we will seek all the peaceful and principled ways of addressing our problems, until the regime is reigned in soberly. I thank you United we stand but divided we fall!! Vuka Mthwakazi Vuka!!