Sokwanele (Harare)
23 December 2011
document
Born in Zvishavane on 15th September 1946, Emmerson Mnangagwa is perhaps the one figure in Zimbabwe to inspire greater terror than President Mugabe.
Beginning a career steeped in intrigue and violence with the bombing of a Masvingo train in 1965, he sat in jail through the earlier phases of the liberation war, serving the 10-year jail sentence he received for the bombing incident.
On his release and subsequent deportation to Zambia, he studied law until 1976 when he returned to Zimbabwe.
On his return, he became Special Assistant for Security for the Office of the President and member of the ZANU National Executive in 1977, although it was not until 1980 that he was to attain his most momentous, and most catastrophic, position as Minister of State for Security, head of the CIO.
Mnangagwa is widely viewed to have orchestrated much of the Gukurahundi genocide of the 1980s, in which those deemed to be ZIPRA cadres or simply ‘dissidents’ around 20 000 people, largely Ndebele were brutally and systematically murdered by a specially-commissioned army unit, the Fifth Brigade.
Revealing his aims in masterminding the Gukurahundi campaign to have been the annihilation of Matabeleland and the Midlands, Mnangagwa claimed at the time that his “campaign against dissidents can only succeed if the infrastructure that nurtures them is destroyed” and that he had the impunity to raze “all the villages infested with dissidents”.[1]
In 1985, Mnangagwa headed the suppression of the report of the Chihambakwe Commission on the first years of the violence.[2] Earlier this year, he was met with widespread condemnation for claiming that the period of Gukurahundi was now a “closed chapter”, which the MDC of Welshman Ncube stated to be “an insult to the victims of Zanu PF’s grand plan of exterminating the Ndebele people” and which ZAPU condemned as “provocative, irresponsible and not fit to be uttered by someone who knows for sure that 20,000 innocent people lost their lives at the hands of the Fifth Brigade”.[3]
In 1989, he became Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, a position he occupied until 2000, alongside his year-long tenure as acting Minister of Finance in 1995.
Defeated in the Parliamentary elections for Kwekwe Central in 2000, President Mugabe decreed that Mnangagwa become Speaker of Parliament instead.
Despite another Parliamentary election defeat in the same constituency five years later, President Mugabe appointed him to the role of Minister of Rural Housing and Amenities.
After winning the Chirumanzu-Zibagwe seat in the wake of the 2008 electoral violence, he ascended a year later to his current role of Minister of Defence.
As head of the Joint Operations Command, the high-powered body that directs the government’s military strategy across Zimbabwe, Mnangagwa is widely viewed to have coordinated ZANU-PF’s campaign of torture, murder, and repression that comprised the run-off election in 2008.
[4] Former Amnesty International Director stated Mnangagwa to have “openly admitted the army’s involvement” in the brutal run-off election campaign.[5]
In 2010, Mnangagwa was reported, alongside Jonathan Moyo and War Veteran leader Jabulani Sibanda, to be planning “a massive genocide across all Mashonaland, Manicaland and Masvingo Provinces” which the three would unleash after the proposed constitutional referendum and upcoming elections.[6]
He has been implicated in a number of coup attempts, in which he or others have given the appearance of hoping to unseat President Mugabe and insert Mnangagwa in his place.
His reputed demotion to Rural Housing and Amenities Minister in 2005 has been claimed as punishment for his implication in the infamous ‘Tsolotsho’ coup attempt of 2004. Implicated in another coup attempt in 2009, Mnangagwa reportedly had his offices raided by CIO forces as a result.[7]
Mnangagwa is also widely touted to be the richest politician in Zimbabwe, his powerful and often clandestine business network pervading much of the country and its recent history.
In 2002, Mnangagwa was named by the United Nations as a key player in the illegal exploitation of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s mineral resources, himself taking a cut of illegal transactions facilitated by him in Zimbabwe and recommended by the UN for travel bans and financial restrictions as a result.[8]
These stand alongside the targeted sanctions placed upon him by the international community as a result of his role in the last decade of repressive government in Zimbabwe.
Also named in the UN’s report was Mnangagwa’s reputedly long-standing friend, John Bredenkamp. One of Britain’s richest men, Bredenkamp is a man whose history as a collaborator with Ian Smith’s pre-liberation regime sits ill with Mnangagwa’s reputed role in the liberation struggle.
Bredenkamp reportedly helped the Smith regime “to purchase arms for its war against African nationalists”, and in 2006 was forced to flee Zimbabwe to escape possible arrest by the ZANU-PF government “on allegations of flouting exchange control regulations, tax evasion and contravening the citizenship act”.[9]
Moreover, Bredenkamp was reported to have been “named as the main financial backer of the infamous Tsholotso indaba” and had “thrown his support behind Mnangagwa”.[10]
Mnangagwa was also implicated in an illegal gold trading scandal in 2004, which led to ZANU-PF henchmen threatening to “shoot everyone” at the paper who had published the story and implicated Mnangagwa.[11]
In 2009, Mnangagwa was implicated in a $37 billion foreign currency scandal as a member of the board of Treger Holdings.[12] This followed a string of corruption allegations which had led to a ZANU-PF investigation in 2004 by virtue of his network of connections to Treger, Zidco (on whose board Mnangagwa sits), First Banking Corporation, and a host of other companies associated with ZANU-PF.[13]
Mnangagwa’s faction of ZANU-PF reportedly owns a security company, Midsec, the premises of which were subject to a police raid in 2010 and the seizure of “an assortment of heavy guns, bombs, rifles, pistols and shotguns”.[14]
Midsec forms a small part of an empire of companies reputedly seized from exiled Zimbabwean businessman, Mutumwa Mawere, by Mnangagwa in 2004.[15]
Alleged to have been seized by Mnangagwa were “Zimre, the holding company of Nicoz Diamond, Fidelity Life Assurance, Fidelity Life Asset Management Company, Fidelity Securities, Fidelity Life Medical Aid Society and Zimbabwe Insurance Brokers”, alongside “AAM, Steelnet, Turnall, General Beltings, Tube and Pipe Industries, First Bank, Pigott Maskew, FSI, CFI Holdings, with its subsidiaries, Agrifoods, Victoria Foods, Dore and Pitt, Farm & City, Suncrest, Crest Breeders and Ross Breeders”.[16]
Earlier this year, Mnangagwa reportedly took over formerly bankrupt wholesaler Jaggers, with branches in Harare, Chipinge, Chitungwiza, Graniteside, Mutoko, Filabusi, and Bulawayo.[17]
Questions remain over his involvement in the Marange diamond fields, both financial and factional. Those aligned to the late Solomon Mujuru are alleged to want “to wrest control of the Marange diamonds from the faction aligned to Mnangagwa whose key figures are associated with the companies mining in the controversial area”.[18]
In May this year, Mnangagwa was also implicated in a secret deal with the Chinese government for the funding of “a Mazoe based Military College”, “kept a secret for more than two years” and with the Chinese diamond mining company, Anjin, “believed to be the benefactor” of the deal.[19]
In March of last year, Mnangagwa was faced with embarrassing allegations of extortion of white farmers in the Midlands province, “reportedly demanding as much as US$5 000 from each farmer so that Mnangagwa can “protect” them from eviction”.[20]
Reputed to own numerous farms himself, Mnangagwa has continued to threaten violent eviction of white-owned commercial farms through, by his own admission, the “spilling of blood”.[21]
Despite being “taught to destroy and kill”, in 2010 Mnangagwa claimed to have “found God” and will allegedly “die in Christ” after having “found favour” in His eyes.[22]
AllAfrica – All the Time