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JSE Say hello to Bob's heir apparent
January 09, 2005 Edition -1
Basildon Peta
When Joyce Mujuru styles herself as "a very strong, courageous and determined woman", this is no self-help Geri Halliwell talk.
After all, how many would dare abandon family life and school at the age of 18 to join a ferocious liberation war and raise children in the bush while downing choppers and eluding enemy bullets?
A story doing the rounds in Harare further defines Mujuru's extraordinary human qualities. According to the story, when she hears that her husband, former army commander and highly influential Zanu-PF politician, Solomon Mujuru, has sired children out of wedlock, she goes out of her way to locate these children and establish if her husband's concubines have the wherewithal to look after the extra maritals.
If not, she takes the children into her custody at one of the family farms in Ruwa, near Harare, without even consulting her husband. Many of the children in the Mujuru household are not hers, those close to the family say.
"My war experiences changed my life," says Mujuru, who was born in a poor peasant family of 12 and left home as a teenager in 1973 - against the wishes of her parents - to join Zanu-PF guerrillas fighting Ian Smith's regime from Mozambique.
"I became very strong and learned to make decisions and not to wait for men to decide," she adds. She is an affable character, yet ruthless when duty calls.
Upon joining the war, Mujuru adopted the nom de guerre Teurai Ropa or "Spill Blood" in English. She immediately lived up to that reputation.
On February 17, 1974, a group she was assigned to during an incursion into Zimbabwe encountered Smith's Rhodesian forces and was brutally dispersed leaving Mujuru to face the enemy on her own.
A wounded colleague threw her gun at Mujuru and implored her to flee. She had other ideas. She aimed at a helicopter descending to finish her off.
"Incredibly, I hit the machine and there was a lot of black smoke and it crashed. A big explosion followed," she was quoted as saying of the incident in which all the white occupants of the helicopter perished.
The incident marked a turning point in Mujuru's guerrilla reputation when news of it had spread throughout the camps of Zanu's armed wing Zanla in Mozambique. She was soon to be elevated to become one of the camp commanders.
When President Robert Mugabe's campaign of confiscating white farms for redistribution to blacks began in earnest in February 2000, Mujuru ruthlessly endorsed it.
Mujuru urged farm invaders to go and return with "blood soaked T-shirts and shorts of white farmers and any of their black collaborators".
At independence in 1980, then semi-literate, Mujuru became the youngest cabinet minister aged 25 in Mugabe's cabinet, taking the portfolio of sports, youth and recreation.
Now Mujuru is - officially at least - firmly in line to succeed Mugabe, when he retires as expected in 2008. This after her historic elevation to the post of vice-president of both party and country at the five yearly Zanu-PF congress last month.
Yet despite her steely nerves and heroism, Mujuru would herself have been most surprised by her sudden rise.
As the debate on Mugabe's possible successor gathered momentum over the past few years, Mujuru's name never featured at all. In fact if Mugabe's 53 ministers and deputies had been ranked in terms of each one's likeliness to be a Mugabe successor, Mujuru would have occupied one the last three slots.
"No one ever contemplated her as obvious presidential material," says University of Zimbabwe analyst and National Constitutional Assembly chairman Lovemore Madhuku.
"A good reputation in war does not necessarily translate into good leadership. To some, her long presence in cabinet has more to do with gender balance than competence. In 1980 she became a minister knowing nothing else but how to hold a gun."
So what is behind Mujuru's spectacular rise? Many analysts, including University of Zimbabwe political scientist Eldred Masunungure, believe Mujuru is merely a pawn in a deadly political game.
Her influential husband, Solomon Mujuru, who probably gets more of Mugabe's ear than his wife, has much to do with her rise. It was Solomon's determination to block a rival, former cabinet minister and Speaker of Parliament Emmerson Mnangagwa, that resulted in Mujuru's elevation.
But where does Solomon Mujuru draw his power? It is universally accepted in Zanu-PF that without Solomon's active support, Mugabe would have been a nobody. Solomon and the late Josiah Tongogara led the Zanla forces when Mugabe languished in jail for 10 years from 1964.
When he went to jail Mugabe had been a mere secretary for information in Zanu-PF, formed in 1963 as Zanu only, and then led by Ngabaningi Sithole.
Mugabe unilaterally seized control of Zanu in 1975 after his rival, Herbert Chitepo, who had been anointed by Mugabe's predecessor, Sithole, to lead the party, while both Mugabe and Sithole languished in jail, was assasinated in a mysterious car bomb in Lusaka.
Mugabe had slipped into Mozambique after his release from jail with the active support of Solomon Mujuru, who implored guerrillas, most of whom had never met Mugabe, to accept him as their leader.
"As a result Mugabe owes (Solomon) Mujuru an eternal favour," said one Zanu-PF insider.
Solomon took over the command of the army at independence in 1980, retiring 10 years later to go into business. But he remained an influential member of the Zanu-PF Politburo, where he clashed with Mnangagwa, long considered Mugabe's favoured heir.
This happened when Mnangagwa, then a powerful cabinet minister, thwarted Solomon's bid to buy into the multibillion- dollar Zimasco, a chrome mining and smelting concern in Zimbabwe's Midlands Province, in the mid 1990s.
Solomon, who prefers to work behind the scenes and is not known to be power hungry himself, is said to have declared that he would throw his name in the ring, if Mugabe ever opened the way for Mnangagwa to rise to the top office. Such a battle for control of the party would have been too ghastly even for Mugabe to contemplate.
When Mnangagwa became tainted with all sorts of corruption allegations, including a UN report which linked him to the looting of Congo resources, this provided a perfect opportunity for Mugabe to sideline him and opt for Solomon's camp.
The cover for this manoeuvre was feminism - a requirement that one of the co-vice-president posts, to replace the late Simon Muzenda, be reserved for a woman. This effectively blocked Mnangagwa, as the other vice-president position is held by Joseph Msika and must also be kept for someone from Matabeleland in line with a 1987 unity accord with Joshua Nkomo's Zapu.
The move to elevate Mujuru led to the infamous meeting at the rural home of Information Minister Jonathan Moyo to try to plot a strategy to sabotage Mujuru's rise. Mugabe got wind of the meeting, leading to the demise of several top officials, who had been Mugabe's confidantes, including Moyo himself.
Prominent Zimbabwean lawyer and human rights activist Daniel Molokela says after the Mugabe tragedy, Zimbabweans must now brace themselves to face something worse - "a Mujuru presidency in Zimbabwe in 2008".
Mujuru has not particularly distinguished herself in any of the various cabinet portfolios she had held. She should have resigned in 1998 when she was named among senior officials who looted the War Victims Compensation Fund.
Her admirers credit her for taking time to go back to secondary school in between her busy schedule after she was appointed minister in 1980. She earned six ordinary level passes in the process, a certificate below matric.
However, she is now rumoured to be aiming for her first degree through correspondence. To those who laughed at her broken English, she had one question, "How come it is acceptable when the Chinese, Germans and all other foreigners speak in broken English? English is not my first language."
Few observers see her as presidential material and believe that if elected to State House, she will be a mere puppet of her husband and Mugabe. Yet the prospect of Mujuru becoming Africa's first woman president now seems inevitable.
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