“Tra..Trabara, Trabarasi..eh…Trabablas!”

Do you remember this moment when Vice President, Retired General Constantino Chiwenga struggled to pronounce the word Trabablas in Masvingo on 1 July 2022?

When he finally made it, amid cheers from the crowd at the well-attended rally, the VP noted that ‘Trabablas’ himself had corrected him.

While it may have passed off as a light-hearted moment, ZimTracker fact checked the war name, often uttered by the members of the Presidium and officials in Masvingo, and discovered ‘Trabablas’ was a clear case of an unfulfilled promise by the President.

Trabablus Trail

On April 8, 2015, then Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa visited a site at Masvingo’s railway station where he claimed that he had bombed a Rhodesian train during the liberation struggle.

Mnangagwa enshrined the spot which the ZANU PF Department of Environment and Tourism said was going to be turned into a national monument called the ‘Trabablas Trail’-derived from his Chimurenga nom-de-guerre, Trabablas Dzokerai Mabhunu.

His wife Auxillia, who was then the ZANU PF Deputy Secretary for Environment and Tourism, told The Patriot that her department was spearheading the historical tourism initiative and partnering with various stakeholders. The partners included the ministries of Home Affairs, Environment, Water and Climate and the Tourism and Hospitality Industry and the department of National Museums and Monuments.

“As a department we are revisiting and enshrining those historical moments which define the resilience and determination of the common citizen fighting for independence into tourism packages under the banner of historical tourism,” she said.

“The programme will see the department going to places of historical and cultural significance and have the eyewitnesses or survivors chronicle the details. This will promote the true story about the liberation struggle and enlighten our youths that the so much celebrated freedom did not come on a silver platter,” she told The Patriot.

In early April 2015, then Minister of Tourism and Hospitality, Prisca Mupfumira, who was then ZANU PF secretary for Environment and Tourism in the politiburo, also visited the Masvingo Train station to assess the site.

On April 25 2015, a meeting by an Inter-Ministerial Committee on Enshrinement set up was later convened at the site to prepare the work on the shrine.

Vice chairperson of the committee, Dr Gibson Mahachi, who is the director of the National Museums and Monuments, said the work on the site was set to start at the end of May 30, 2015.

The meeting was attended by the late Roman Catholic Church priest, Father Emmanuel Ribeiro, then Zanu PF Masvingo provincial chairperson Ezra Chadzamira and then Zanu PF director of environment and tourism, Stewart Mutizwa.

Three years later, in April 2018 after Mnangagwa had landed the presidency, The Herald reported that work on the site was delayed after some of the President’s war paraphenalia was vandalised by his rivals in ZANU PF – known as the Generation 40 (G40) faction.

This happened at the height of the party power struggles that culminated in him fleeing to South Africa after he was sacked as the Vice President by late former President Robert Mugabe.

A month later in May 2018, The Herald reported that work on the shrine was to ‘start soon’ as the design work for the monument was complete.

The Herald further reported that government had released about $500 000 for the enshrinement of four liberation war sites countrywide, which are The Trabablas Trail,  Kamungoma in Gutu, the site of the famous Chinhoi Battle of 1966 in Mashonaland West and another site in Lupane, Matebeleland North.

But seven years later, despite the money being released there is no Trabablas Trail shrine to talk of in Masvingo. The old decaying train station remains nondescript as it was before, while the bombed locomotive has since disappeared from the site.

Our verdict- The President has failed to fulfill his own Trabablas promise