A daring plot to oust President Emmerson Mnangagwa through an impeachment process has been “foiled”, according to one of the Zanu PF leader’s loyalists.
The rebels “lack the numbers for impeachment”, according to Justice Mayor Wadyajena, the MP for Gokwe-Nembudziya who had been approached to flip.
Another supporter of the embattled 76-year-old leader, former Harare East MP Terence Mukupe, claimed that Mnangagwa had received “words of comfort and support” from “ZIPRA cadres” – thought to be a coded reference to Zimbabwe Defence Forces Commander Phillip Valerio Sibanda, who fought the liberation war on the side of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA).
Mnangagwa announced on Sunday that he was cutting short his five-country trip in Eastern Europe to return home, amid a swell of speculation that his deputy, Constantino Chiwenga, the general who led the November 2017 coup that ousted former President Robert Mugabe, had approved a plan to force him to resign under the threat of impeachment.
The rebels, said to be supported by war veterans leader Chris Mutsvangwa and Zanu PF heavyweights Obert Mpofu, Patrick Chinamasa and Oppah Muchinguri, the first two denied a seat in Mnangagwa’s Cabinet, met with 35 MPs in Harare last Friday at which the plot was laid out. Wadyajena and Mukupe had also been invited, after the rebels calculated – it appears wrongly – that the two were sufficiently disillusioned after also failing to make Mnangagwa’s Cabinet.
The rebels accuse Mnangagwa of failing to ujjknify the country by placing tribal clansmen in key government positions and also mishandling the economy, which led to countrywide riots on January 14 after he decreed a 150 percent rise in the price of fuel. The military and police have unleashed terror in response, leaving at least 12 people dead and 250 others maimed, according to human rights groups.
It is not clear what a weekend canvass of Zanu PF MPs by the rebels yielded, but both Wadyajena and Mukupe, who is not an MP but is seen as influential, revealed that they had been forced to abandon their homes after threats were made, apparently after they did not go along with the plan to recall Mnangagwa.
