via Mnangagwa poison attempt! Really? 17 December 2014
As old age takes its toll, President Robert Mugabe’s utterances are becoming increasingly bizarre. Sounding like a hapless spin doctor for Emmerson Mnangagwa, he told Zanu (PF) supporters last week that some people had attempted to kill his new deputy by spraying some deadly substance in his party office.
Mnangagwa’s secretary and two other people became the victims when they went into the office in the morning and inhaled the unknown substance – initially identified as cyanide. The secretary ended up in the intensive care unit. The problem is, Mugabe sounded as though he really believed this gory fib. Now the official media, as usual, is proceeding as if we have already agreed that someone, somehow, intended to kill Mnangagwa just on the day he would be announced as the new vice president.
I am taking this crude claim of an assassination attempt on the man they call the Crocodile with a truckload of salt. Mnangagwa’s reaction confirms my belief that it is nothing but a foggy tale. Despite his secretary being admitted to hospital in a critical condition, we never heard that Mnangagwa visited her to show his sympathy.
Instead, what we saw in the official media was a grainy photo of the poor secretary’s daughter and hardly anything else. A compassionate boss is supposed to go and fortify his ill secretary when such a tragedy occurs. There must be certain things that he was aware of that many do not know to date.
The new VP’s comments on the incident are also fishy. When the media engaged him, he was self-centred. He never sympathised with the secretary and the other two victims of the poisoning incident. Instead, he went on and on about the anti-colonial struggle and how he was ready to forgive his enemies – maybe just the imaginary ones.
This kind of reaction to a poor imitation of a James Bond episode leaves the impression that Mnangagwa, was right from the start, concerned exclusively with making a statement about himself to Bob and the rest of the world. I felt there was just too much emphasis on himself in that. His response discredited him as a leader and diluted the core claim that his enemies wanted to get him and possibly stop his installation as Mugabe’s senior deputy.
I think the people involved in this saga have been watching too much Nollywood stuff. How on earth do they expect that we will believe the fact that some people would stroll around Shake Shake House with a bagful of cyanide and proceed to plant it in an office without being detected? Where were the security details? It would be interesting what findings the police, who claim to be investigating the case will come up with, if anything.
The office poisoning saga looks like a build-up to the drawn-out vilification of arch-enemy Joice Mujuru. That it happened just ahead of Mugabe’s announcement of Mnangagwa as his vice president tells a lot. Ultimately, it seems, someone wanted to give the impression that Mujuru was unrelenting and would not give up, even when she had been kicked out.
I have no qualms that the wily Mnangagwa is a grandmaster at political diversion. As the party drew closer to the congress, he was involved in a mysterious road accident. His car was hit by some truck donated by imagined regime change agents. There were screaming headlines that he had escaped death by a whisker. Heaven forbid! How could that be when the man got out of the car without even a scratch? We have not been told what happened to the truck driver who we were made to believe somehow wanted to eliminate Mnangagwa.
Was he taken to court? Did he pay a fine? Due legal process might have taken place after the accident, but the fact that nothing has been said about it gives way to the possibility that someone was/is trying to play games with us. It would always be safe to assume that the accident, just like the poison incident, was meant to sell Mnangagwa as an innocent victim of some wicked scheme. There is some cocky schemer out there drawing a caricature of the Crocodile as a political martyr.
Mnangagwa is not the most popular politician in Zimbabwe. His rebound to the vice presidency has come with a fair share of controversy, considering the manner in which his faction plotted against the Mujuru camp. He used dirty tactics to get to where he now stands. So he needs people’s sympathy while also diverting our attention from the crude manner in which he has been working his way to the top of the pile.
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