By Staff Reporters

In a lamentation of a forgotten soldier, an uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) guerrilla and former death-row prisoner, Mthetheleli Mncube (60), has pointed an accusing finger at the ANC government.

Speaking at the funeral of his former co-accused, Mzondeleli Euclid Nondula, who died of natural causes last week aged 57, Mncube told mourners the governing party neglected Nondula like many other liberation war veterans.

Nondula was laid to rest in a quite affair shorn of the habitual state funeral reserved for politicians.

The two were sentenced to death in 1988 for their epic fight with the apartheid forces that resulted in the killing of 10 white people in the then Messina, now Musina, Limpopo.

The pair planted landmines that killed eight farmers and two apartheid soldiers. Mncube killed two white police officers who captured him after he and Nondula parted ways.

Mncube, Nondula and Robert McBride were freed in a deal that included former Wit Wolf, Barend Strydom, to a chorus of protest that slammed the deal as a ploy by the former regime to exempt from prosecution state officials involved in the killing of anti-apartheid activists.

“To the ANC, you too you failed him like many of us. Many of us are now retired but not peacefully. How can you retire peacefully when you are still hungry and without a decent pension?” Mncube said.

Many MK and APLA combatants are still battling to make ends meet. I heard that a big funeral is planned at Mdantsane Stadium by the ANC and the army to bury him with all the respect he deserves, although you did not give him the same respect when he was still alive.

&A wise man once said, ‘Rather give a man a carnation on his lapel than a great wreath on his coffin’.”

“Mzondeleli died without a house of his own. He was a widower and I am told with no children of his own. I think that was as a result of severe torture that he was subjected to. He never even owned a car. All these are the results of what we call Severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. No one understood that. To date, we never received counselling, at all,” he said.

Last year, Mncube had stern words for the government as war veterans marched in Durban to demand their rights.

“The ANC of OR Tambo is dead and all I see is the fight for the corpse or the remains of the ANC. It is so sad. I hear others talk of the revival of the ANC. I say, you can’t revive a dead horse. All we need to do is start from scratch with a new ANC. The current leadership is rotten to the core. They must all go, even the NEC.

“We are led by men and women who never raised their clenched fists or threw a mere stone against the brutality of the apartheid regime. So, how can anyone expect them to implement the Freedom Charter or radical economic transformation? They can’t even remember a simple thing like observing the release of the last ANC/MK prisoners,& said the MK veteran.

“It is my fervent wish to see this country and the people rescued from the political criminals who are enriching themselves and spitting on our hard-won freedom. People need to be defended from corrupt leaders.”