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The death of Cde Enos Chamunorwa Chikowore once again robbed the nation of one of its illustrious and distinguished nationalists. The Zanu-PF Politburo member, veteran nationalist and former Cabinet Minister, died at his Harare home on Tuesday April 12, 2005. He was 69. Cde Chikowore served his country well throughout his political career: as a youth leaguer in the early 1960s; in the liberation struggle and after Independence, in public office as a legislator and in different portfolios as a Minister of Government.

Cde Enos Chikowore was born in 1936, in Chikowore Viliage, Chief Mutekedza area in Chivhu. He did his primary education at Chitauro Primary School and proceeded to Kwenda Mission for secondary education. He trained as a teacher at Waddilove Institute where he taught for a while. Later, Cde Chikowore studied Bookkeeping and Accountancy by correspondence, before joining the Central African Airways’ Accounts Department.

Cde Chikowore’s involvement in politics dates back to early 1958 when he joined the youth wing of the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress (SRANC). When the SRANC was banned, Cde Chikowore joined a group of nationalists to form the National Democratic Party (NDP) in January 1960. When the NDP was banned in December of the same year, he became the leader of an underground wing which led to the birth of ZAPU. The repeated vicissitudes of early nationalist organisations did not dampen or diminish his resolve and determination to advance the struggle.

In 1963, when the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) was formed following the split within the nationalist ranks, Cde Chikowore became its first National Secretary for Youth Affairs. It was during this turbulent period that Cde Chikowore, then popularly known as “General Chedu”, put his indelible stamp on nationalist politics. Based in Highfield, itself a hotbed of militant African nationalism, Cde Chikowore was the cutting edge of the new politics of confrontation by which the nationalist movement communicated its determination to free the country by any means necessary.

As head of the embattled party’s youth wing, the burden of planning, organising, equipping and mounting sabotage missions against targeted settler interests was his. He was bold and decisive. He was part of a shadowy underground movement which secured dynamites from mines like Shabanie and Mashava, with which to blast selected vital installations. Indeed, many targets were hit, thanks to General Chedu’s brave group, and of course other sleek players who included the late Vice President Simon Muzenda. Cde Chikowore and his group foreshadowed the armed phase of our struggle soon to set in and later to engulf the whole country in fire, forcing the Rhodesians to the negotiating table. Like most nationalists, he suffered restrictions, detentions and repeated imprisonment.

Cde Chikowore left the country in 1966 for Zambia where he was instrumental in the formation of the Dare reChimurenga, and was responsible for recruiting cadres for the war of liberation, as well as running errands of the struggle between Lusaka and Dar es Salaam, the two nerve centres of the liberation struggle. It was during one such errands that he was involved in a horrible car accident which he was lucky to survive, but not without a spinal complication that would nag him in his later life.

In 1967, he went to the United Kingdom for further studies and he obtained a Diploma in Public Administration from the University of York, before proceeding to study Law at the University of Leeds. While in the United Kingdom, Cde Chikowore was a ZANU student representative.

Together with the late Cde Witness Mangwende, Cde David Karimanzira, Ambassador Muchada and other cadres then in Diaspora, Cde Chikowore was responsible for the welfare of the nationalists during the Lancaster House talks which lasted for three months from October to December, 1979. At Independence in 1980, Cde Chikowore was elected into the House of Assembly where he became the Parliamentary Deputy Chief Whip. In 1981, he was appointed Deputy Minister of Local Government and Housing and in 1982 he became the substantive Minister of Local Government and Town Planning.

In 1984, Cde Chikowore was elected into the ZANU PF Central Committee and the following year he was re-elected into the House of Assembly as Member of Parliament for Kadoma. In the Cabinet of 1985, he was appointed Minister of Local Government, Rural and Urban Development. Cde Chikowore also served as Minister of Public Construction and National Housing. During his tenure as Minister of Local Government, Rural and Urban Development, Cde Chikowore managed to re-organise Rural and Urban Local Government structures transforming them from racially divided enclaves into non-racial instruments of balanced and integrated development. He also pioneered a National Housing Scheme which provided decent housing to urban dwellers.

In 1997, he was appointed Minister of Transport and Energy, a post he held until his resignation in the year 2000 after a fuel crisis that gripped the nation that year. His decision to voluntarily resign earned him respect, as many people commended him for putting the interests of the country above his own.

At the time of his death, Cde Chikowore was the Zanu-PF Politburo Secretary for Lands and Resettlement. He was a firm believer in the implementation of one-man-one-farm policy. At the 2004 Zanu-PF Fourth People’s National Congress, Cde Chikowore took a swipe at some top officials for not taking heed of the call by the Presidency to surrender extra farms for a more just resettlement programme envisaged by the party.

He said: “The issue of multiple farm ownership does not only reveal indiscipline and dishonesty in the perpetrator’s mind; it also reveals dangerous disloyalty and lack of faith in the principles that have guided our mighty revolutionary party so far. There are termites within our ranks; they are not people.”

Cde Chikowore agonised for unity and was deeply hurt when his former constituency of Kadoma fell to the opposition by a small margin in the 2005 poll, a margin owing more to divisions within the party than voters’ affection for the opposition.

Cde Chikowore was described by the President as a long-serving party cadre, a humble and dependable comrade in the struggle.
At the time of his death he was survived by his wife, Verna Joyce Sadziwa Chikowore and three children, Tendai, Tsitsi and Nyasha.

Source: A Guide to the Heroes Acre.