MPUMALANGA – Independent analyst Gakwi Mashego has strongly criticized the deputy minister of defence and military veterans, Thabang Makwetla, for what he termed a desperate attempt to discredit former president Jacob Zuma.
The ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) on Monday made the decision to summarily and temporarily suspend Zuma’s membership for “bringing the party into disrepute,” stating that Zuma’s public support for the newly formed MK party and his campaign against ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa violated the party’s constitution.
Mashego refuted Makwetla’s claims, responding to his opinion piece in a Sunday newspaper where he criticized Zuma for “misleading” people into thinking he was part of the MK leadership in exile. During a radio interview, Mashego challenged Makwetla to write an autobiography about his life in exile instead of using the media to undermine the MK leader.
” I think people like Makwetla and those revisionists, the best they can do for the nation is to write books,” he said. ” They need to write books about their own lives instead of writing about the obituaries of other people.
Why doesn’t he write a book so that people who were not in exile can know the truth about this thing?”
Mashego, a journalist, filmmaker, and poet, continued to assert that Makwetla was leveraging his proximity to the media and political power to tarnish Zuma’s image. ” They are trying to tarnish him becuase they are angry and also they are taking advantage of ignorance that they are in society whereby social media makes a lie fly faster than a ballistic missile,” he stated.
Mashego also highlighted that Makwetla was among several high-ranking ANC politicians implicated at the Zondo Commission, allegedly benefiting from security upgrades to their homes provided by Bosasa.
In explaining his article, Makwetla argued that Zuma was never part of the leadership overseeing MK in exile. ” He created an impression that there is credibility in his decision to establish a party in the name of uMkhonto weSizwe,” Mashego said. “Zuma has done many heroic things in his life in the ANC but for him to say he is so concerned about what is happening today that he feels MK must be constituted as a party, is unfortunate because as part of the ANC leadership in that era, he was not part of the military headquarters of MK.”
He asserted that Zuma was a member of the internal political construction committee working under the political military committee of the ANC. ” was not part of the military wing of the ANC’s headquarters. All the senior leaders that were in that structure are known. It is not my view, it is history, it is documented and it is open,” Makwetla emphasized.
