Through the Wire: Pamire, Makamba and Gono jingles for Grace Mugabe

By Lance Guma

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Even though President Robert Mugabe was banging his secretary Grace Marufu while his wife Sally was dying of a kidney ailment that has not stopped his Zanu PF party running campaign ads attacking rival Morgan Tsvangirai for getting a 21 year old woman pregnant during a period when he was single.

While most Zimbabweans want to know what the different candidates have to offer in their campaign manifesto’s Zanu PF has chosen to abuse its monopoly of the state media to run personal attacks. Should then the MDC respond with jingles on all the men linked with the Second First Lady Grace Mugabe?

You could almost see it, jingles on Peter Pamire, a businessman killed in a suspicious car accident, James Makamba, a businessman who fled into exile over dubious foreign currency charges and Gideon Gono the current Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor who was also forced to deny an affair with Grace.

It was shocking to hear Grace Mugabe telling residents who had been frogmarched to a campaign rally in Marondera that Tsvangirai had courted over 100 women before he settled for his current wife Elizabeth Macheka and because of this he was not a worthy leader.

“In these days of HIV/Aids, we have a grown up man like Tsvangirai moving around sleeping with every woman he comes across on the pretext that he is choosing a partner, how can we have a leader of loose morals like that? He is not principled,” she is reported to have told the crowd.

Facts tend to be stubborn. Tsvangirai’s wife Susan died in a suspicious car accident in March 2009. In a period of three years, a single Tsvangirai was linked with three women before he married Elizabeth Macheka. The three are Loreta Nyathi, Nosipho Regina Shilubane and Locadia Karimatsenga.

Grace Mugabe on the other hand had an affair with a married Mugabe when his wife Sally was battling a chronic kidney ailment. The affair resulted in two children, Bona, named after Mugabe’s mother, and Robert Peter, Jr. You can throw in the Peter Pamire, James Makamba and Gideon Gono accusations later.

Sally was never able to have any children with Mugabe after their only son, Michael Nhamodzenyika Mugabe, born 27 September 1963, died on the 26th of December 1966 from cerebral malaria in Ghana where Sally was working.

Sarah Francesca (Hayfron) Mugabe, popularly referred to as Sally Mugabe, was Mugabe’s wife until her death in 1992. On the 17th of August 1996, Mugabe married his former secretary, Grace Marufu, 41 years his junior, with whom he already had two children while she was married to Goreraza.

Bona Mugabe is 23 years old, meaning she was born in or around 1989, some three years before Sally Mugabe died. Robert Jnr, is 19 this year, meaning he was born in or around 1993, a few months after the death of Sally in 1992.

Meanwhile Mugabe dealt with Grace’s husband, Wing Commander Stanley Goreraza by dispatching him to work as a defence attaché at the Zimbabwean embassy in China. Goreraza and Grace had one child, a son, Russell Goreraza, who now manages his mother’s extensive farm property, Gushungo Dairy.

The couple only divorced between 1995 and 1996. But then again we only bring these issues out to expose the hypocrisy of our leaders. What the Zanu PF campaign team are essentially saying to the Zimbabwean population is that you must choose between a womaniser (Tsvangirai) and a murderer (Mugabe.)

It was under Mugabe that the notorious Fifth Brigade army unit butchered over 20 000 people in the Midlands and Matabeleland provinces during what are now termed the Gukurahundi Massacres.

In 2005 under Operation Murambatsvina nearly a million people had their homes and livelihoods destroyed. In June 2008 under ‘Operation Mavhotera Papi- Where did you vote?’ an estimated 500 people were killed and thousands injured in state sponsored attacks after they voted Tsvangirai to victory.

Among the victims were women and children. Any campaign advert that wants to portray Zanu PF as caring about the welfare of women is doomed to fail. Zanu PF and Mugabe have been responsible for the deaths and misery of thousands of innocent women through political violence, murder and rape.

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