Zimbabwe politician expelled for insults

The ruling party in Zimbabwe expelled one of its co-founders for insulting President Robert Mugabe in a recently published autobiography, a government newspaper reported.

A meeting of party leaders in Edgar Tekere's home district of Manicaland in eastern Zimbabwe, "unreservedly condemned" Tekere's book, "A Lifetime of Struggle," which was published in January and is selling briskly, according to the Sunday Mail.

In his book, Tekere said Mugabe lacked the charisma to support the founders of the current ruling party when they broke away from a liberation group. He said Mugabe did not favor the split, contrary to official party history that holds that Mugabe led the schism.

But it is Tekere's more personal accusations that have angered the autocratic Mugabe, the country's only leader since the country's independence from Britain in 1980, and his close colleagues. Mugabe himself has dismissed the autobiography as the work of an unbalanced mind.

Tekere, who like Mugabe was one of the architects of the seven-year guerrilla war that ended white colonial rule, insisted Mugabe was indecisive, "weak" and had no military experience. The book strongly questioned Mugabe's role in guerrilla operations and alleged he had been reluctant to flee to neighboring Mozambique to join guerrilla commanders there after his 1974 release from prison.

The autobiography "clearly and explicitly denigrates and vilifies" Mugabe, the newspaper quoted provincial Zimbabwe African Nation Union Patriotic chairman Tinaye Chigudu as saying.

He said provincial leaders would not consider an appeal by Tekere.

Tekere, 69, a former secretary-general of the ruling party and long seen as a political maverick, left the party a decade ago to form a short-lived opposition group he called the Zimbabwe Unity Movement. He said he founded that party to oppose corruption in Mugabe's government. Last year he was granted readmission on the condition that he not seek party office for five years.

The book has become a local best-seller at a time when Mugabe's popularity is plummeting amid the nation's worst economic crisis since independence, including more than 1,000 percent inflation, the highest in the world, and acute shortages of hard currency and gasoline.

Critics blame the country's economic woes on the government's chaotic and often-violent seizure of thousands of white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to black Zimbabweans. Mugabe defends the program as a way of righting severe imbalances in land ownership inherited from British colonial rule. He blames food shortages in a country that once was a regional breadbasket on years of crippling drought.