15/10/2025
🧨 Even If Chiwenga’s A Destroyer, Some Believe He Might Reset The Cycle — As A “Reformer By Exhaustion”
ANALYSIS: Mnangagwa and Chiwenga — The Twin Engines of Treachery and Terror
By Simba Chikanza | The story of Emmerson Mnangagwa and Constantino Chiwenga is not a rivalry between reform and corruption: it is a war between two architects of destruction, both cut from the same blood-soaked cloth. For nearly five decades, these men have built, fed, and now turned against the same monstrous system of deceit, violence, and state capture that has left Zimbabwe in ruins.
🔴 1. The Roots of Treachery: 1975–76
Their partnership in betrayal began in 1975-6, when Mnangagwa and Chiwenga participated in the first great act of liberation treachery — the elimination of the ZANU founding leadership, led by Herbert Chitepo and Ndabaningi Sithole.
From that moment, Mnangagwa and his handlers in the Rhodesian Special Branch began planting loyal operatives inside the liberation movement. Among these embedded figures was Robert Mugabe, promoted as the new leader under a British–Rhodesian plan to control post‑independence Zimbabwe through covert infiltration.
Chiwenga, then a young guerrilla, and the Commissar in the High Command allowed Mnangagwa’s co option as the President’s special assistant under the same ZANLAor ZANU faction backed by Rhodesian intelligence. This alignment would define Zimbabwe’s future.
🔴 2. 1980 — The Coup Behind Independence
Grace Mugabe’s 2017 revelations about Mnangagwa’s role in manipulating Mugabe trace back to the first coup, not in 2017 but in 1980.
As she described, Mnangagwa convinced Mugabe to “flee to Mozambique” under the false claim that “the whites want to kill you.” In reality, Mugabe was being lured into a trap — a plot that was only foiled by Samora Machel and Julius Nyerere.
That moment cemented Mnangagwa’s intelligence empire — and his partnership with Constantino Chiwenga, who from that point became his field enforcer.
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🔴 3. Gukurahundi — The Pact of Blood
During the 1980s massacres in Matabeleland, Mnangagwa was the architect and Chiwenga the executioner.
From his base at Brady Barracks, Chiwenga commanded operations that killed tens of thousands of civilians under the false banner of “dissident hunting.”
Mnangagwa, as State Security Minister, oversaw the machinery — coordinating with former Rhodesian intelligence agents Ken Flower and Dan Stannard, embedding Rhodesian tactics into the DNA of the new state.
Their partnership was not about ideology. It was about consolidating control through murder, intimidation, and silence.
🔴 4. A Culture of Boastful Violence
Both men have boasted publicly of their brutality.
• Mnangagwa: “I was trained to kill and destroy.”
• Chiwenga: “I crush you until woita seinda.”
The Vice President’s own words mirror the fate of those who opposed him.
He once warned Nelson Chamisa with those chilling words — “woita seinda” — the same language that defined the 1 August 2018 massacre, when soldiers under his command gunned down six civilians.
He later accused Chamisa of causing the violence — a cynical reversal that fooled no one.
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🔴 5. The Curse of Power and the Trail of the Dead
The list of those destroyed in Mnangagwa and Chiwenga’s power games is long:
• Solomon Mujuru, once the Commander of the Defence Forces, reduced to ashes under suspicious circumstances.
• Mary Chiwenga, crippled and silenced — living evidence of the same cruelty her husband once threatened others with.
• Civilians, women, and soldiers who vanished or were “disabled” in the system’s purge of dissent.
Every act of state violence since 1980 bears the fingerprints of one or both of these men.
🔴 6. The New War — Zvigandanga vs. Zvigananda
Today, Zimbabwe is witnessing a new version of the same curse.
On one side: Mnangagwa, carried by a gang of corrupt billionaires — the “Zviganandas” like Wicknell Chivayo and Kuda Tagwirei, men who steal from the state and pose as patriots.
On the other: Chiwenga, leading the Zvigandanga — soldiers and veterans who believe only force can cleanse the rot they helped create.
A viral cartoon captures it perfectly:
Mnangagwa sits on the shoulders of a bloated thief; Chiwenga marches forward with a gun in one hand and the constitution in the other.
Zimbabwe is trapped between a fat criminal and a furious general — a rock and a hard place.
🔴 7. The Foreign Connection — China’s Criminal Arm
Adding to the decay is a new class of Chinese syndicates, not representing China as a nation but a criminal elite exploiting Zimbabwe through backdoor deals.
These networks destroy roads, loot minerals, and dismantle infrastructure — all under the cover of “development.” Mnangagwa’s regime tolerates them because they feed his patronage machine.
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🔴 8. The Inevitable Clash
The Mnangagwa–Chiwenga alliance is collapsing under its own weight.
Both men are destroyers — one cloaked in money, the other in military power.
The question now is not who is righteous, but who will destroy the other first.
Zimbabweans have reached the end of tolerance. As one protest slogan put it:
“We don’t care who replaces him — we just want Mnangagwa gone.”
Even if Chiwenga is a destroyer, many believe he might at least reset the cycle — a “reformer by exhaustion”, a man too broken to continue the blood game.
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🔴 9. The Verdict
Emmerson Mnangagwa and Constantino Chiwenga are not two rivals for reform — they are co‑authors of Zimbabwe’s pain, two faces of the same betrayal that began before independence and has never ended.
The country is once again at a crossroads between coup and collapse — between Zvigandanga and Zvigananda, between the gun and the gold.
Zimbabwe’s tragedy is not that it has bad leaders — it is that it keeps surviving them.- Simba Chikanza
