President Mugabe is facing what could be the most formidable threat yet to his 35-year rule after Joice Mujuru, his former vice-president, announced the formation of a new party.
The 92-year-old leader removed Mrs Mujuru from her position in the government and the ruling party in November 2014, citing plots of treason and witchcraft against him, but no charges have been brought. Her dismissal was followed by the expulsion of party officials seen as loyal to a faction in the political establishment that she was accused of leading.
Since then Mrs Mujuru, 60, the widow of a former army commander, has said little while her followers prepared for the foundation of Zimbabwe People First (ZPF) — a play on the name of the ruling Zanu (PF) party.
“We are a new entity with new values, and followers from every political party,” Mrs Mujuru told a press conference yesterday. “I stand for peace. I am not here to fight anyone.”
She said the party was committed to rejoining the Commonwealth — from which Mr Mugabe withdrew in 2003 after Zimbabwe was suspended for human rights violations — and to free and fair elections. She promised investor-friendly economic policies and an end to corruption.
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Mrs Mujuru is not the first senior Zanu (PF) official to form a party but she is in a strong position, with the support of a large number of ruling party leaders and much of its grassroots. Her expulsion led to open splits inside Zanu (PF), which Mr Mugabe has vowed to lead until he dies. For the first time since it came to power in 1980, party officials have been hurling abuse at each other in public — and Mr Mugabe has been unable to stop them.
Mrs Mujuru intends to challenge her former boss in the next elections, in 2018. “She is untested, but she does seem to be attracting considerable sympathy,” Eldred Masunungure, a political commentator, said.
In 2009 Mrs Mujuru’s husband, Solomon, who was the first black commander of the army, died in a fireball at his farm — an incident that was widely seen as an assassination. “The staple response from Zanu (PF) to opposition parties is violence,” Mr Masunungure said. “She is going to need the skin of a rhinoceros, because she will be swimming in crocodile-infested waters.”
Mrs Mujuru was barely out of her teens in the 1970s when she joined the guerrilla war against white rule in what was then Rhodesia, and adopted the nom de guerre Teurai Ropa: “spill blood”. In her first media interview when the war ended in 1979, she claimed to have shot down two Rhodesian air force helicopters. At the age of 25 she was appointed as a minister in Mr Mugabe’s first cabinet, and became vice-president in 2004.
Mrs Mujuru began studying from home to complete her high school qualifications soon after her appointment, and continued until she was awarded a doctorate from the Women’s University in Africa, based in Harare, in 2014 . Her colleagues in the government described her as competent, eager to learn, fair and approachable.
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Critics, however, say that there is another side to the motherly Mrs Mujuru, and she has been dogged by claims of corruption, including an illegal attempt to sell three tonnes of gold nuggets, fake claims for compensation for war injuries and the looting of the state-owned steelworks. She has dismissed the claims as “the work of subversives”.