VP struggles to explain Grace Mugabe protocol arrangement

Politics
IN African politics image is everything, and nowhere so than in Zimbabwe, where a succession battle is silently raging.

IN African politics image is everything, and nowhere so than in Zimbabwe, where a succession battle is silently raging.

Mail and Guardian Africa

First Lady Grace Mugabe has well muscled her way into the thick of it, as her husband, 91-year-old Robert Mugabe increasingly shows the strains of office, despite insisting he still has a lot in the tank.

The fray has already cost one vice-president, Joice Mujuru, her job after she was ruthlessly forced out of government in an onslaught led by Mrs Mugabe, the coup de grâce being Mujuru’s expulsion from the ruling party in April.

Grace-Mugabe-liars

Mujuru’s successor and bitter rival, Emmerson Mnangagwa, is also in the thick of it. A long serving leader in the ruling ZANU PF and Mugabe ally, he has now attracted Grace’s attentions, although she has been careful not to directly scrapple with a man well-versed in political trench warfare, delegating the sniping to a group of young-but-also-ambitious political turks that call themselves Generation 40.

Also arrayed against Mnangagwa is his co-vice president, Phelekezela Mphoko, a former liberation struggle stalwart and long-serving diplomat whom Mugabe plucked from obscurity last year.

Mphoko’s challenge is that he does not have an identifiable power base, and despite his ambitions—he loudly rejects the perception that he is a second fiddle vice-president and insists he is at par with Mnangagwa—has been left in limbo.

Mphoko is known to be close to South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, who was his bestman at his wedding in 1977. He has in some corners been touted as a compromise candidate. But the sight of Mphoko introducing Grace at recent taxpayer-funded rallies on which she has embarked on as she tests the waters over her rumoured presidential ambitions has left him flailing, all but confirming that despite being her junior, she has easily powered past him.

Speaking before introducing the First Lady at a Zanu PF rally in Rushinga in northern Zimbabwe on October 14, Mphoko said Grace must be respected as she was Mugabe’s wife.

He insinuated that she represented Mugabe and deserved the same respect.

Grace, on a well worn path, player her part, rounding on the country’s private media for questioning why a vice president and Zanu PF’s second-in-command would be reduced to introducing her at rallies.

“The important thing is that vice presidents Mnangagwa and Mphoko are in the [ruling party organ] presidium. Amai (Grace) is the wife of His Excellency,” Mphoko said as he laboured to explain.

“The media asks why I introduce her. There are three families here which are His Excellency and his wife, VP Mnangagwa and his wife as well as VP Mphoko and his wife.”

Inseparable

No one could separate the three families, he said.

“President Mugabe is the leader in this country and the First Lady is wife to His Excellency. Naughty people will say she is leading a faction,” Mphoko said.

“Now can I turn and say those who appointed me lead a faction yet His Excellency is the centre of power? How can the First Lady lead a faction? That is a lie because President Mugabe cannot lead a faction. He is our centre of power.”

Mphoko said those Zanu PF officials who were unhappy with such an arrangement should form their own political parties as others have done. Ousted Mujuru is also seen to be readying her own party ahead of 2018 elections.

Mphoko was the previous week again forced to introduce Grace at another rally in Chimanimani in south-eastern Zimbabwe.

At Rushinga, he had to brave the sweltering temperatures in a queue to welcome the First Lady. Interestingly, the VP has to follow by road, while Grace travels in a presidential helicopter that is escorted by a military plane.

Grace said journalists who were questioning the arrangement were stooping low and should go back to school to learn protocol.

“You are influenced to write things that don’t matter at all, you write rubbish,” she said. “Why are you stooping that low? Huh! Nonsense! Journalists don’t stoop so low,” she said, adding she was open to criticism and that people wanted diverse views.

After a spirited-if-routine attack on journalists mostly from private media, Grace went a step further by advising them to go for “psychiatric” examination.

Secretary for Information and presidential spokesperson George Charamba has recently also lashed out at journalists over what he called negative publicity, earning him heavy criticism from players who feel he is seeking to clamp down on media freedom.

But in Mugabe’s often-riveting succession Game of Thrones, the clues are as much in the non-verbal as the verbal.