According to Mutsvangwa, the rift between Mnangagwa and Chiwenga centres on the upcoming ZANU PF elective congress, where Chiwenga is reportedly resistant to facing a challenge for the top party post. 

Chiwenga allegedly wants to be endorsed as the party’s First Secretary and presidential candidate, while Mnangagwa is pushing for a more democratic process, allowing other candidates to contest the leadership position.

This power struggle is set against the backdrop of Mnangagwa’s constitutional term limit, which expires in 2028. 

Despite a 2024 party resolution to extend his tenure, Mnangagwa has publicly stated that he will not seek to remain in power beyond the constitutional limit. Said Mutsvangwa:

This guy wants to be anointed as the President’s successor. He wants to remove him but while in the process of removing him he is saying the President should anoint him. How do you do that?

Mugabe used to nominate his deputies but this time number one is saying we must go for elections and that is normal for a democratic party.

According to Mutsvangwa, one of the major blots on Chiwenga’s leadership aspirations is his controversial handling of his embattled ex-wife, Marry Mubaiwa. 

Mubaiwa, who suffers from acute lymphoedema and has undergone the amputation of an arm and a leg, faces allegations of attempting to kill Chiwenga when he was hospitalised in South Africa.

For over three years, Mubaiwa has been entangled in a protracted legal battle, with her passport held by the courts. This has denied her the opportunity to undergo life-saving treatment abroad. She has also been denied access to her children with Chiwenga. Said Mutsvangwa:

Can you imagine, half of the electorate are women in this country and you have decapitated the limbs of your former wife through cruelty and you are refusing her to see the children, including the ones she came to you with.

When Number One tries to pardon her, you refuse. He reeks of cruelty against all women in the country, he cannot win so he does not want elections, but the president has upended him and told him to sell himself to the electorate.

Notwithstanding Chiwenga’s claim to hold a PhD in Ethics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, Mutsvangwa asserts that the former army general is, in fact, functionally illiterate. He said:

If you want to know that a Shona-speaking person did not go to school ask that they pronounce the letter L.

The letter R comes from the mother, the L comes from a teacher, that is the basic litmus test of an illiterate Shona person.

He never managed to graduate from the mother’s alphabet. Going to war is no substitute for illiteracy and ignorance, we went to war from universities.

More: NewZimbabwe.com