Chiwenga illusion by Divine Mafa

THE CHIWENGA ILLUSION

A Political Thesis

By Divine Mafa — Zambesia Economic Movement

10 May 2026

PREAMBLE

This thesis is written not in anger but in alarm. Some of Zimbabwe’s most intelligent political minds — people who have been in this struggle for decades, people who understand the system, people who have suffered under it personally — are making an argument that will cost Zimbabwe everything if it is not challenged directly and honestly.

The argument is this: that Chiwenga represents a viable path to change. That his conflict with Mnangagwa creates an opening. That the opposition should position itself to benefit from that opening.

This thesis argues the opposite. Not because Chiwenga is misunderstood. But because he is understood perfectly — and what we understand about him makes the argument for his utility as a change agent not just wrong but dangerous.

PART ONE — THE MEN MAKING THE ARGUMENT

Let me be honest about who is advancing the pro-Chiwenga positioning. These are not naive people. These are not people who do not know history. These are people like Ibbo Mandaza — one of Zimbabwe’s most sophisticated political analysts, a man who has written brilliantly about the post-colonial state and its failures. People like Tendai Biti — a former Finance Minister who knows better than almost anyone what ZANU-PF did to the Zimbabwean economy and what it cost the people who trusted the opposition to fight it.

These are serious people. Which makes their current positioning more troubling not less.

Because when serious people make a bad argument, the argument gets dressed in serious language. It gets the benefit of serious credentials. And ordinary Zimbabweans — who are desperately looking for any exit from what they are living through — hear serious voices saying Chiwenga and think perhaps there is something there.

There is not.

PART TWO — WHY CHIWENGA BECAME VICE PRESIDENT

This is the question that exposes everything.

Why would a man who commanded the entire Zimbabwe Defence Forces — the most powerful institutional position in the real power structure of Zimbabwe — leave that position to become Vice President?

The answer most people give is wrong. They say he wanted political power. They say he was ambitious. They say he wanted to be president one day.

That misses the point entirely.

Chiwenga did not leave military power for political power. He used military power to manufacture political power — and then kept the military power underneath the political title as permanent insurance.

He staged a coup. He removed a sitting president. He installed his preferred candidate. And then he collected the Vice Presidency as his reward — not as a retirement from power but as an addition to it. The VP position gave him constitutional legitimacy, a public platform, succession rights, and state resources. The military gave him the actual force that made all of it real.

He never stopped being a general. He just acquired a second business card.

PART THREE — THE 2017 TIMING AND THE OPPOSITION

Here is what the analysts who are now positioning toward Chiwenga seem to have forgotten about 2017.

The coup did not happen because Mugabe was old. Mugabe had been old for years. The coup did not happen because Grace was incompetent. The coup did not happen because Chiwenga suddenly discovered democratic principles.

The coup happened because the MDC Alliance had just been formed. Because Tsvangirai was still alive and drawing massive crowds. Because a unified opposition for the first time in years represented a genuine electoral threat. Because if Grace succeeded Mugabe and then faced a unified opposition in 2018 — the entire liberation war generation faced the beginning of accountability.

Chiwenga moved to protect the system. Not to change it.

The 2018 election that followed was not an election. It was a demonstration. It demonstrated to every Zimbabwean, every opposition candidate, every international observer — that the military had decided who would govern Zimbabwe and that the ballot was a formality to be managed, not a mechanism to be respected.

Mnangagwa did not win in 2018. The message Chiwenga sent in November 2017 won. The message was simple — we will remove presidents we do not like. Govern accordingly.

PART FOUR — THE SON, THE EMPIRE, AND THE ROMAN COMPARISON

Now we come to the current moment. And to Sean Mnangagwa.

Emmerson Mnangagwa is not simply trying to hold power. He is trying to dynasticise it. He is positioning his son Sean not as a future candidate in a competitive process but as a designated heir in what is increasingly looking like a family empire.

The people around Mnangagwa who are pushing Sean’s profile are not doing so because Sean has demonstrated exceptional governance capacity. They are doing so because the logic of the system they have built requires a succession that protects the family and the network from accountability.

Ibbo Mandaza, Tendai Biti, and others are framing Chiwenga as the antidote to this dynastic ambition. They are essentially saying — Chiwenga is the check on Mnangagwa’s Caesar complex. They are presenting him as the republican general who will prevent the emperor from installing his son.

But consider the Roman parallel they are implicitly invoking.

Octavian — Caesar Augustus — did not restore the Roman Republic. He used the chaos of civil war, the ambitions of competing generals, and the exhaustion of a traumatised population to make himself the first Roman Emperor. He did it while calling himself simply the first citizen. He did it while maintaining the forms of republican governance — the Senate, the consuls, the tribunes — while draining every one of those institutions of real power.

If Sean Mnangagwa is the dynastic Caesar these analysts fear — then Chiwenga is not the republican hero who stops him. Chiwenga is Octavian. He is the man who will use the conflict, the chaos, and the opposition’s desperate hope to install himself as the permanent power behind whatever structure emerges.

The opposition will be the Senate. Given titles. Given ceremonies. Given the appearance of relevance. While the real decisions are made by the man who controls the legions.

PART FIVE — WHAT MANDAZA AND BITI ARE GETTING WRONG

Ibbo Mandaza has spent his career analysing the post-colonial African state with exceptional clarity. He understands that the liberation war generation created a political culture of entitlement — a belief that having fought for independence confers permanent governance rights regardless of performance or popular consent.

And yet the argument he is now making — that Chiwenga represents a viable transitional figure — contradicts everything that analysis should conclude. Because Chiwenga is not the solution to the liberation war generation’s pathology. He is its most militarised expression.

Tendai Biti knows what ZANU-PF does to agreements. He lived it. He was Finance Minister in the Government of National Unity. He watched ZANU-PF use the GNU to stabilise the economy — and then use that stabilisation to rebuild their electoral machine, crush the opposition’s grassroots structures, and return to full power having taken everything the GNU offered and given nothing of substance in return.

He knows this. He was there.

And yet the logic of his current positioning leads toward another version of the same arrangement. Another GNU. Another transitional structure. Another agreement with men who have demonstrated comprehensively that they do not keep agreements once they no longer need to.

The question is not whether Mandaza and Biti are intelligent. They are. The question is whether exhaustion, desperation, and the intoxicating smell of proximity to power are distorting the analysis of people who should know better.

PART SIX — THE PEOPLE PAYING THE PRICE FOR THIS ANALYSIS

While the political analysts debate the merits of Chiwenga as a transition figure — while the think pieces are written and the podcast conversations happen and the WhatsApp groups of the political class buzz with strategic positioning — ordinary Zimbabweans are living the consequences of every hour of continued ZANU-PF rule.

Teachers who cannot afford transport to schools where they earn poverty wages. Children sitting examinations in buildings with no roofs. Patients dying in hospitals that have no basic medication. Farmers on land they do not own working soil that is not being properly supported. Young people packing bags for South Africa, for Botswana, for anywhere that is not here — because here has nothing left to offer them.

These people are not waiting for Chiwenga. They are not waiting for an NTA. They are not waiting for the political class to finish its strategic debate.

They are simply suffering. Every day. While the debate continues.

Every day that the opposition’s energy goes into positioning around ZANU-PF’s internal conflict is a day that energy does not go into building the structures that could actually change Zimbabwe’s future. Every day spent hoping Chiwenga does something useful is a day not spent organising the grassroots movement that makes Chiwenga irrelevant.

PART SEVEN — CAB 3 AND THE COST OF DISTRACTION

CAB 3 is moving through parliament now.

This constitutional amendment — which removes the last meaningful checks on executive power, which entrenches the capacity for permanent one-party rule, which makes future accountability legally more difficult — is the most important legislative battle Zimbabwe’s opposition has faced in years.

And the opposition is distracted.

Distracted by the Chiwenga question. Distracted by the Sean Mnangagwa question. Distracted by the internal ZANU-PF conflict that the analysts are treating as an opportunity rather than a manipulation.

CAB 3 passing is not a setback. CAB 3 passing is a generational defeat. It changes the legal terrain on which every future opposition movement will have to operate. It is designed to make what the United Opposition is trying to build harder — legally, constitutionally, institutionally harder.

The distraction around Chiwenga is not accidental. ZANU-PF understands that an opposition focused on internal ZANU-PF conflict is an opposition not focused on CAB 3. The noise around the generals serves the bill.

CONCLUSION — WHAT THE OPPOSITION MUST DO

Stop looking at Chiwenga.

Not because he is not dangerous — he is. Not because the ZANU-PF succession conflict is not real — it is. But because the opposition’s energy, focus, and credibility are finite resources that must be directed at what can actually be changed.

Chiwenga cannot be changed. He is what he is. A general who staged a coup, converted military power into political currency, and will use whatever conflict presents itself to advance his own permanent positioning. He will not become a democrat. He will not share power genuinely. He will not protect the opposition’s interests in any transitional arrangement.

What can be changed is the opposition itself. Its fragmentation. Its tendency to look for salvation from above rather than building power from below. Its susceptibility to the argument that the only path to change runs through the people who have been preventing change.

The Zambesia Economic Movement is not built to position around ZANU-PF’s internal conflicts. They were built to make ZANU-PF irrelevant — by building something so rooted in the people, so disciplined in its organisation, and so clear in its purpose that no general’s ambition and no dynasty’s succession plan can absorb or neutralise it.

Ibbo Mandaza is a brilliant man. Tendai Biti is a brave man. But on this question they are wrong. And Zimbabwe cannot afford for the opposition to follow them into another arrangement with the people who destroyed it.

The system that produced Chiwenga must fall.

The system that produced Sean Mnangagwa must fall.

The system that produced every compromise that brought us to this moment must fall.

Not be reformed. Not be transitioned. Not be managed by a new face with old hands.

Fall.

Completely. Permanently.

That is the thesis.

Divine Mafa

Founder — Zambesia Economic Movement

10 May 2026

This is serious stuff, well thought out. It is pity that not many people have the intellect to comprehend even a fraction of what you are saying and so there will be no meaningful change of direction. And so the nation will continue to blunder from pillar to post.

Still, I salute your effort and encourage you never to give up. As much as I have spoken about millions of Zimbabweans being brain-dead, there is a mountain of evidence to prove this, I still believe even the brain that has ossified into fat is capable of regeneration. Your contribution may provide the spark to start that regeneration process. 

Keep up the good work!