Denford Magora's Latest Zimbabwe News Blog

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai chats with President Robert Mugabe at State House after the President had sworn in ministers nominated by the Prime Minister from his own party to replace those he had fired Harare, Zimbabwe 18 July 2010 A source extremely close to Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai this last week described the fighting in Tsvangirai's party as "frightening" while claiming that the opposition party is so disorganised that "we will never take power from ZANU PF". The source, a confidant of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, blamed all the infighting on the Prime Minister, saying he was told "not to rock the boat" but went ahead anyway to reshuffle the cabinet on his side." The source also confirmed that Tendai Biti, the Finance Minister in Zimbabwe's coalition government and MDC-Tsvangirai's Secretary-General was saved from being reshuffled or fired by President Mugabe himself. "The PM came back from a Monday meeting one d...

Theresa Makone, (above) of the MDC-Tsvangirai and now co-Minister of Home Affairs in Zimbabwe's Coalition Government, ganged up with her relative, the ZANU PF Minister in charge of the Secret Police to "intimidate" police officers and demand the release of the ZANU PF Minister's son, who is in police custody for invading and grabbing a white-owned company. He and an accomplice, Themba Mliswa, who is a nephew of the ZANU PF Minister, are still behind bars, with the Zimbabwe police making public complaints through the state media that the two ministers' actions are "tantamount to defeating the course of justice". The ZANU PF Minister says that is nonsense, while Makone has refused to comment. Harare, Zimbabwe, 05 July 2010 Theresa Makone, the newly-installed co-Minister of Home Affairs in the Coalition Government has already started using her new powers: to demand the release of the detained son of a senior ZANU PF Minister. Makone is wife to the Permanent...

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, seen here holding hands with President Mugabe after the swearing-in of new MDC-T Ministers to replace those fired by Tsvangirai in his struggle to contain infighting within the opposition party has now gone ahead and fired  Harare, Zimbabwe, 04 July 2010 Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who is also president of the MDC witha surname (the MDC-T), has taken gloves off and taken the fight to Secretary General Tendai Biti (also Zimbabwe's Finance Minister in the coalition government). Tsvangirai last week fired high level officials at Harvest House, the MDC-T's Head Office in Harare, Zimbabwe. Among those to go were the Finance Director of the party and members of the Secretariat, which Tsvangirai is accusing of being in service of Tendai Biti in his alleged bid to unseat Tsvangirai at the next Congress of the MDC-T. This is coming after Tsvangirai fired several ministers and demoted others in a recent reshuffle of his ineffective rump of the Coa...

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai At the Press Conference today when he fired Energy Minister Elias Mudzuri and shifted some deck chairs on the Titanic Government. Harare, Zimbabwe, 23 June 2010 Clearly, the knives are now out for those said to be plotting against Morgan Tsvangirai's Life Presidency of the MDC that carries his surname. The Prime Minister of Zimbabwe has fired one of the two heavyweights against him in the party. Elias Mudzuri, the Minister of Energy, is now no Minister at all, "redeployed to the party", according to Morgan Tsvangirai. Tendai Biti the PM left alone. This is basically a shot across the bow for the Finance Minister. Now he knows Tsvangirai means to be elected president at the next Congress and still has power to destroy careers for the leaders of the MDC-T. Indeed, the tone of the press conference left no doubt at all that the Prime Minister had said he was firing Mudzuri for incompetence. Mudzuri also suffered for what Tsvangirai considered ...

Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank Governor, Gideon Gono (above), is still operating pretty much as though he were the de facto Prime Minister he was before the formation of the coalition Government between Morgan Tsvangirai and Robert Mugabe. Harare, Zimbabwe, 07 February 2010 Senior staff at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, headed by Mugabe's blue-eyed boy, Gideon Gono, have spent US$215 000 on food in the last month, with the money having been authorised by officials in Tendai Biti's Ministry of Finance. Biti is also the MDC-Tsvangirai Secretary-General. The Minister claims that this expenditure is being made without his knowledge and that he is being "circumvented"! Gono has been emboldened by Biti's failure to have him fired. Mugabe has personally and publicly said "Gono is not going anywhere, show me what wrong he has done." Quite a lot of wrong, he as done, it turns out. Recently, as Tendai Biti toured the world, going to America to lobby Congressmen to rem...

Robert Mugabe is greeted yesterday (Saturday 30 January 2010) at Bole Airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he is attending the African Union Summit, at which, surprisingly, Zimbabwe has been elected into the Peace and Security Council of the continental body, the African Union. Mugabe is currently on a high, after getting the aid of the British in putting Morgan Tsvangirai on the back foot, getting the support of regional and African leaders for his calls for Tsvangirai to make Britain and "her allies"lift"sanctions against him. Harare, Zimbabwe, 31 January 2010 In February 2009, Morgan Tsvangirai threw Robert Mugabe a lifeline, thereby assuring the loser of Zimbabwe's last credible presidential poll a continued stay in office. Now Mugabe is using the very same lifeline given to him by Morgan Tsvangirai to strangle the MDC-Tsvangirai leader. Tsvangirai is feeling the heat. As I predicted early last year (when I said it will not be long before we hear Morgan Tsvang...

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai playing buddy-buddy with newly sworn-in Vice President John Nkomo in Harare last month. The Prime Minister has egg on his face again today after announcing one of Mugabe's "promises" as fact to his supporters, only to have ZANU PF announce yesterday that the MDC was simply "making noise"! Although his supporters refuse to see it or accept it, the Prime Minister in way over his head. Harare, Zimbabwe, 23 January 2010 Robert "The Solution"Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, has gone back on yet another promise to Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe's hapless Prime Minister and Mugabe's ally in the coalition government currently ruling Zimbabwe. This time, Mugabe is going back on his word concerning the appointment of ambassadors from the MDC-Tsvangirai party. When an "agreement"was reached between Mugabe and Tsvangirai over Zimbabwean ambassadors, Tsvangirai announced that the Zimbabwe president has agreed that o...

Nampower, the Namibia Power Utility Company one of whose stations is shown in the photo above says media reports that Zimbabwe Energy Minister Elias Mudzuri had stopped power exports are a pack of lies and that Nambia is still getting its power from Zimbabwe as normal, even as Zimbabwe itself reels under a severe shortage of power and puts its businesses and citizens through punishing schedules of power cuts and load-shedding Harare, Zimbabwe, 18 January 2010 Zimbabwe's closest ally in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) has accused the Zimbabwe government of lying that they had stopped power exports to Namibia in a statement that says Nampower is aware of the "alleged  Directive from the Zimbabwean Energy Minister to ZESA." There was an outcry when it emerged that Zimbabwe's power company, the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) was importing and then re-exporting power supplies to Namibia in order to fulfill a contractual obligation to its Nam...

Lovemore Moyo, the Speaker of Zimbabwe's Parliament, is now engaged in an ugly and unprofessional turf war with the Clerk of Parliament, whom the MDC-Tsvangirai faction sees as a ZANU PF appointee. It is a continuation of the turf war between Mugabe and Tsvangirai, with the Prime Minister and his party trying to assert their authority as the largest party in parliament. This has led them to see conspiracies everywhere, including in the professional conduct of the Clerk. The Clerk stands his ground and it appears that there is nothing the MDC-T can do to him since he is playing it by the book, while Tsvangirai's party wants him to "get with the programme." Harare, Zimbabwe, 20 December 2009 The fight for political space and authority between ZANU PF and Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC has now spilled into parliament, with the Clerk of Parliament, the long-serving Austin Zvoma, threatening legal action against the MDC-Tsvangirai-appointed Speaker of Parliament Lovemore Moyo...

While Robert Mugabe was busy making faces in Copenhagen (where he delivered his predictable broadside at the West, Britain "and its allies and also moaned about sanctions), back home, his Acting President was busy accepting gifts from the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, who publicly declared yesterday that they will now intensify their efforts to woo Zimbabweans with direct aid in the form of food hampers and clinics Harare, Zimbabwe, 18 December 2009 It used to be that the Americans and the West were worried about the "Red Menace". Southern Africa was the final battleground of the Cold War, with apartheid South Africa citing Communism as the reason for its existence. But now, it appears the new Cold War is between Christianity and Islam. Day before yesterday, the Islamic Affairs Council of Zimbabwe handed over goodies out in Bindura, the home province of Vice President Mujuru (Acting President, who is not referred to as "Commander in Chief of the Defence Forces...

Robert "The Solution" Mugabe opens the Chirundu One-Stop Border Post on Friday (above). Today, he spent six and a half hours battling to contain a rebellion within the ZANU PF Politburo but managed to triumph in the end. He will be the candidate for ZANU PF in the next election in Zimbabwe. Same old same old. Whichever way you look at it, this is simply delaying the inevitable. Harare, Zimbabwe, 08 December 2009 The ZANU PF politburo met for more than six hours today and made some decisions that would be stunning for those who do not follow this blog. First, let me remind you that when I broke the story of Mugabe's offer to Dumiso Dabengwa for the the post of Vice President of ZANU PF and Zimbabwe, I also mentioned that Mugabe thought highly of Simon Khaya Moyo, the current Zimbabwe ambassador to South Africa. Mugabe was said by my sources at the time to be opposed to Nkomo and would have preferred Dabengwa or even Khaya Moyo, who many considered a non-factor when I menti...

What investors? Mugabe arrives for Tendai Biti's Budget speech at parliament in Harare. The Zimbabwe government has installed two mining companies illegally at claims owned by someone else, despite their assurances to the contrary. Harare, Zimbabwe, 07 December 2009 It turns out the Inclusive Government of Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai lied through its teeth about the mining that is going on at Chiadzwa Diamond Fields. Only last month, they told us that the companies that have been given concessions to mine the area were "not mining the areas that are under dispute" - referring to the fight against Government by African Consolidated Resources, which is the original holder of the licence to the Marange claim. ACR had their licence withdrawn (probably because they are British) and had 129 400 carats of diamonds they had already mined seized, never to be seen again. But now it has been revealed that the two mining companies in partnership with Zimbabwe Government-owned...

Robert "The Solution" Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai in parliament n Wednesday to listen to Tendai Biti, the Finance Minister, deliver his 2010 Budget Speech. It now emerges that Mugabe has largely won out in the negotiations going on under the facilitation of the Southern African Development Community point-man, Jacob Zuma, president of South Africa. Biti's budget also revealed that the MDC-T are looking to stay in this government for as long as they can, possibly five years, and this is said to be informing their decisions to give in to Mugabe on key points. Harare, Zimbabwe, 06 December 2009 Very authoritative sources now say Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has essentially capitulated on matters before the negotiating team in the ongoing talks n Harare and an announcement is likely to be made within a fortnight after a report from Jacob Zuma is presented to the Southern African sub-body charged with ensuring that the talks proceed timeously. Names for the Zimba...