Former Zimbabwean Vice President, Joice Mujuru, who fell out of favour with president Robert Mugabe and expelled from the government two years ago has formed a new party.
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Mugabe turns 92 on Sunday and, judging by those comments, has no intention of stepping down – despite being Africa’s oldest leader and the only president Zimbabwe has known since independence in 1980.
At last week’s party rally, Grace said some unnamed people were plotting to physically remove Mugabe and harm his family, accusations similar to ones she made in 2014 against Mujuru, who was then regarded as the most likely successor to Mugabe.
The call by the group, suspected to be supporting a faction led by Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, dubbed Team Lacoste, in the fractured Zanu PF party, came ahead of a special Politburo meeting scheduled for Wednesday, ostensibly to deal with the issue of factionalism, which is threatening to tear the revolutionary party apart.
Mujuru, widow of Zimbabwe’s first post-independence army general, Solomon Mujuru, was sacked from the government and the ruling ZANU-PF party in December 2014.
Mnangagwa is now under fire again from First Lady Grace Mugabe, who accuses the veteran liberation war hero of stitching up a plan with assistance from sections of the military to “kill” her youngest son, Chatunga Bellarmine, as well as bomb her business empire in Mazowe.
“Fighting within ZANU-PF may help, but it will not be enough”.
Well-placed sources told the newspaper then that what was particularly perturbing was the fact that Mnangagwa’s followers were increasingly challenging not just Grace, but Mugabe himself as well, in their public utterances – a situation they said did not augur well for the future of the party and the country.
The campaign against Mujuru led to Mugabe denouncing her before party loyalists as leader of a “treacherous cabal” bent on removing him from power, and firing her.
In the 2013 presidential election, Mugabe won 61 percent of the vote against 34.9 percent recorded by Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC.
Western groups were not allowed to send poll observers, but the United States dismissed the result as “not a credible expression of the will of Zimbabwean people”.
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At the end of last month, Mugabe attended an African Union summit in Ethiopia to give a long speech as he stepped down from his year as AU chairman.
