Luke-ing the Beast in the Eye: SPECIAL REPORT: “President” Sekeramayi , the coup and Mugabe’s manic phone call to Zuma

It is May 2017 and President Robert Mugabe is in Cancun, a resort town in Mexico attending a UN global conference on Disaster Risk Reduction.

While ensconced in his hotel suite, Mugabe summons Saviour Kasukuwere, one of three Cabinet Ministers accompanying him.

In a seven-hour private conversation in the presidential suite, Mugabe tells Kasukuwere, then the Zanu PF political commissar, that he planned to retire at the ZANU PF extra-ordinary Congress in December that year 2017 and he wanted Sydney Sekeramayi to take over from him.

Kasukuwere left Mugabe’s suite around 2am with clear instructions to help mobilise party structures, particularly the youth, to support Sekeramayi for President at the party conference in December 2017.

According to Kasukuwere, that seven-hour meeting with Mugabe in Cancun, Mexico, saw the birth of what informally became known as the Mexico Declaration whose sole purpose was to campaign for Sekeramayi to take over the presidency at the 2017 congress in line with Mugabe’s wish.

After 37 years in office, Mugabe had at last anointed his successor.

But in that seven-hour private indaba, Kasukuwere says he asked Mugabe whether Sekeramayi had the strength and political stamina to stand the heat.

Kasukuwere says he told Mugabe, Sekeramayi was not a fighter and therefore he was unsure whether he would be able to fend off other candidates such as Emmerson Mnangagwa who coveted the post as well and was considered too strong.

“Mugabe said I know Sekeremayi is timid; that is why I am instructing you as the Zanu PF national commissar to lift him up.

“When we get home, you must start to mobilise all the young party members to fight for him at the Congress. We called it the Mexico Declaration after that” says Kasukuwere.

Kasukuwere openly makes these intimate revelations while speaking on record for the first time about the Zanu PF pre-coup dynamics in a just-released, 2025 book by Professor Blessing-Miles Tendi, a renowned Zimbabwean civil-military relations expert based at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

Tendi’s book, titled The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe (Gender, Coups and Diplomats), is a honeypot of well-researched data, including in-depth interviews with key players before, during and after the coup.

The book is an engaging text worth reading not just for ordinary readers keen for the intimate, juicy details about the dynamics around the 2017 coup but also for ardent political science scholars like myself keen to appreciate the book’s revolutionary perspective that all coups are highly gendered events.

After reading the book, my own conclusion was that Zimbabwe’s tenuous, frictional and murderous coup dynamics cannot be properly understood outside the context of that informal declaration instigated by Mugabe himself in the resort town of Cancun in Mexico, North America, in May 2017.

It is now common cause that the Mexico Declaration later died a stillbirth six months later in November 2017 when Mnangagwa and his allies in the military violently grabbed the top job in a coup.

Other factors may have caused and catalysed the coup just before it happened but for me, the Mexico Declaration is a key event in the 2017 coup dynamics.

The fact that Mnangagwa and his allies timed the coup for November 2017 could not have been mere happenstance. It appears they deliberately stole the Presidency just a month before Mugabe could hand over power to his chosen successor.

Indeed, the timing of the coup in November appears to have been deliberate on the part of the coup plotters in the context of the Mexico declaration about which Kasukuwere speaks on record for the very first time in the book..

While the story of Sekeramayi as Mugabe’s anointed successor has been in the public domain for a while, with Mugabe himself having affirmed it at a press conference at his Blue Roof mansion in Harare on 29 July 2018, interesting details about that and other fresh perspectives and dynamics around the 2017 coup are all part of Tendi’s deeply engaging book.

While the book is a revolutionary text in coup literature, particularly its fresh perspective that advances the dictum that gender is the stuff of all coups, it also presents some key political, military, civic and diplomatic actors, including Heads of State, offering their perspectives on record for the very first time about Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup.

My only problem with Tendi is that he thinks Zimbabweans went overboard in equating Grace Mugabe to Marie Antoinette. I also think he stretches his gender bigotry card too far when he writes about the reference to then British ambassador Catriona Laing as Kapfupi, which I thought was an objective reference in light banter to her height which has nothing to do with demeaning her feminine sexuality, as the author seems to suggest.

I have heard the same Kapfupi reference being made on Harare mayor Jacob Mafume and I thought it was simply an objective joke about people of limited height which has nothing to do with sexual bigotry.

My other problem with the book is that it projects Mugabe and the G40 as having been exclusively victims, not just politically but even as passive victims of misogynistic sexist bigotry, never perpetrators.

Anyway, back to the book.

Let me start with the hitherto unknown but interesting anecdotes that are revealed for the first time in the book.

After his meeting with Mugabe, Kasukuwere said he returned to Harare and told Sekeramayi that the President had said he was the anointed successor, to which Sekeramayi said he would abide by the President’s wish.

According to Kasukuwere, unbeknown to them, the Military Intelligence (MI) under Chiwenga as Zimbabwe Defence Forces commander and aligned to Mnangagwa had put everyone under surveillance and had gotten wind that Sekeramayi was the chosen one.

Kasukuwere says a few days after his meeting with Sekeramayi, the Military Intelligence sneaked into Sekeramayi’s bedroom while he was asleep with his wife, stole his trousers, pants, and the suit jacket he had been wearing before he went to bed.

“It was a way of saying to him, hey you, you are not safe. If we can get in here and take your clothes, we can do anything. Drop those Presidential ambitions. From that day, Sekeramayi became very jittery about everything. He was scared,” Kasukuwere says in the book.

The rest, as they say, is history.

And given Kasukuwere’s revelations in the book, we now know why in July 2017, barely two months after Mugabe’s private metering with Kasukuwere in Mexico, Jonathan Moyo addressed the SAPES lecture in Harare telling his audience that Sekeramayi was senior to Mnangagwa in terms of liberation war credentials and had the requisite humility and character of a true leader.

The G40 aligned to Mugabe had indeed begun marketing Sekeramayi, rolling out and cementing the Mexico Declaration in line with Mugabe’s instruction.

But as we now know, Sekeramayi himself had fearfully recoiled into his shell in terror following that stealth raid by the Military Intelligence into his bedroom.

Though Sekeramayi went on to prove his lack of spine as had been feared, Tendi argues that the framing by Kasukuwere and Mugabe of Sekeramayi as too effeminate and as lacking the masculine guts needed for the campaign proves the genderdness of coup dynamics.

Indeed, the fresh perspective in Tendi’s book is that all coups are gendered, as also confirmed by the gendered belief among the coup generals that the Presidency as a masculinised vocation had been betrayed by Mugabe, whose wife, Grace had usurped all Presidential executive authority.

Indeed, the latent, gendered message from the coup generals was that the Presidency was a testosterone zone for masculine power that Mugabe had surrendered to his wife as he had himself become too weak, too effeminate and too unmanly by dint of old age, infirmity and palpable cognitive decline.

Notably, Tendi’s refreshing work also puts into the public domain, this time through a credible witness, the known public secret that Mnangagwa and Chiwenga, the two key coup allies, were also the key looters of the country’s diamonds at Marange.

In the book, Tendi interviewed Rtd Brigadier General Benjamin Mabenge, a former deputy general manager of Anjin Diamond Mining Company at Marange who made a startling revelation about how ED and Chiwenga took away huge amounts of diamonds from the Marange diamond fields.

Mabenge said: “They would load 26 trunks of alluvial diamonds into a plane every night. They were using a relatively big airplane labelled: Ministry of Defence, Government of the Republic Zimbabwe, Anjin Diamond Mining Investment.”

Mabenge also reveals in the book that Mugabe took issue with that plane, requesting to know who was taking “our stones.”

“He (Mugabe) knew the owners of that plane were Emmerson Mnangagwa and Constantino Guveya Chiwenga. And where was the aircraft going? To the East…..” says Mabenge in the book.

“Mnangagwa tried to work with me. But I declined. He knew he could not work with me.”

These bombshell revelations by Mabenge in Tendi’s book may well suggest that by November 2017, the coup allies had amassed enough funds to oil it.

Mabenge said he knew of Chiwenga and ED’s diamond smuggling because the security staff in charge of CCTV cameras were connected to him.

He said among the many members of the security staff who were fired to facilitate the smuggling was Advance Savanhu, who was wartime commander Josiah Tongogara’s personal driver and was on the wheel when Tongogara died in a car accident just before independence.

Mabenge, speaking on record in Tendi’s book, may well have publicly provided the necessary evidence to a well-known public secret about the identities of the kingpins who salted away the national wealth at Marange, even though the two may have fallen out now.

Tendi’s book dwells too on the role of diplomacy in the coup, where the anti-coup norm failed to hold for various reasons, one of them being that the world and the region were keen to see Mugabe’s back. And Botswana’s President Khama does not hide this point in the book.

As one diplomat said; if a coup refers to the removal of a legitimately elected civilian leader from office, many in the diplomatic world did not believe Mugabe had that legitimacy in the first place.

So for this and other reasons, including disinterest on the part of the USA, the region and the world were largely mum about the coup in Harare.

I found then SA President Jacob Zuma’s views about the 2017 coup very interesting. Zuma was also the SADC chairman and he makes it very clear in the book that he was against the coup.

Zuma recounts a very interesting incident during the coup of how Mugabe frantically called him in panic over the phone, seeking his help as he feared the marching mob in Harare would lynch him.

“Mugabe phoned me, very agitated and jittery,” Zuma says in the book. “He called and said hey, President Zuma, they (the marchers) are surrounding our home.

“They are going to kill us. They are going to kill me. They want to kill us. Please come, come and take me. Come, come and take me,” Zuma recalls Mugabe as having frantically pleaded with him.

Zuma also says Mugabe later gave the phone to his wife and he spoke to both of them.

Sensing the panic of his neighbour in Harare, Zuma said he instructed his chief of Defence to call Chiwenga, who then assured the South Africans that he was not going to allow Mugabe to be killed.

Zuma was against the coup but appeared hamstrung both by Pretoria’s long-held posture of a quiet diplomacy approach on Zimbabwe and the political problems that personally confronted him at home.

As SADC chair, Zuma sent envoys to Harare to assess the situation. But as Zama and his officials state in the book, he and his ANC party had their own internal challenges at home, where he was facing corruption charges and faced the prospect of impeachment ahead of the ANC congress in December 2017.

Zuma says he had planned to fly to Harare on 22 November with Zambia’s Edgar Lungu and Angola’s Joao Manuel Laurenco to express their concern about the military overreach in Zimbabwe.

But then, he says, the soldiers moved too fast ahead of the planned trip by the three SADC leaders.

Zuma tellingly snubbed Mnangagwa’s inauguration on 24 November 2017, even though he sent a junior envoy, which in itself was a statement.

That on the day of ED’s inauguration Zuma was hosting President Laurenco who was on a State visit to Pretoria may have been the most convenient cover both leaders needed to avoid being in Harare on the day.

Says Zuma in the book: “I was not happy with the process. It was not a good thing to allow people to change governments like that no matter what issues are in the party. There are other ways of resolving that. So it was difficult for me to go there and celebrate that.”

It is pertinent to state that it was unfortunate, for reasons Tendi states in his book that both SADC and the AU failed to uphold the anti-coup norm in line with their institutional statutes.

In the case of the African Union, Article 4(p) of the Constitutive Act of the regional body is instructive as it explicitly frowns upon military take-overs. But sadly, and for reasons that may demand a review of its institutional framework, the AU chair at the time, then Guinea President Alpha Conde and the AU commission chair Moussa Fati Mahamat sang from different hymn books in their responses to the coup in Harare.

The AU chair President Conde denounced the coup while the commission chair Mahammat accepted it.

Backing himself with coup literature and providing examples, steeped in the praxis of cited coups that have happened in Africa and beyond, Tendi’s key argument appears to be that all coups are gendered enterprises and the 2017 coup in Zimbabwe was no exception.

Tendi refreshingly and convincingly proffers the argument that from the gender-prejudiced perspective of all coup propagators, including Zimbabwe’s 2017 putschists, the Presidency is a testosterone vocation of masculine domination and control.

I also believe that the all-male cast of the 2017 coup mediators that included George Charamba, Father Fidelis Mukonori, Joey Bimha, Gideon Gono and Aaron Tonderai Nhepera may also be understood from the prism of coups being gendered events.

Among these mediators, I had the opportunity in July 2022 to sit down over coffee with Father Mukonori at Visitation Makumbi Mission School where I did my secondary education in my rural hood of Domboshava. When we met for two-and-a-half hours over coffee on a chilly morning, I told Mukonori he owed Zimbabweans a book about his tenuous negotiations during the time of the coup.

I had known Father Mukonori since his days as the Father Superior at Chishawasha Mission where my son, Leslie Tanyaradzwanashe, was headboy at the mission primary school.

Mukonori told me a lot that day, saying it all began one early morning in November 2017 when Charamba called him around 3am asking him to arrange a meeting between the military generals and Mugabe because there were intimate issues that the senior soldiers wanted to discuss with their Commander-in-Chief.

But in the book, we learn that at one time during the coup, the Military Intelligence informed the generals that the Mugabes had received a proposal from mercenaries who said they could rescue them from the coup for a fee of $14million.

It was then the now late Air Marshall Perrance Shiri shouted to Father Mukonori as one of the mediators: “Before we kill the mercenaries, we will first have finished those who paid the mercenaries.”

It is reported that the Mugabes then drew back on the mercenaries’ option after Shiri’s stern warning through Mukonori.

So Father Mukonori was part of the all-male team of mediators during the coup as the generals, in what the author calls their gendered bigotry, raged against what they said was an imminent Grace Mugabe presidency, among their other reasons for mounting the coup.

But as we now know, the prospect of a Grace Mugabe presidency may have been a phantom creation to suit their fancy and to justify their gendered cause because Mugabe, through the Mexico Declaration, had already anointed Sekeramayi as his successor.

Tendi argues that the gender-based arguments to do with Grace Mugabe’s usurpation of Presidential authority as well as the issues that the military raised in their document titled “Summary of the Main Issues and Concerns” as justifications for the coup masked the real motives and true reasons for the ouster of Mugabe.

Among other coup motivations that Tendi argues were not mentioned by the coup plotters were the fear of arrests, the fear of being fired or retired as well as the personal ambitions of the coup leaders.

One of the personal ambitions Tendi mentions in his book, which may be more relevant now given the apparent fallout between ED and Chiwenga was the latter’s ambition to one day govern the country in fulfilment of a prophesy by his dying grandfather in 1965.

While Mnangagwa’s ambition may be a matter of public record given the way he actively put Joice Mujuru out of contention for the Presidency, including probably the elimination of her husband Solomon, Chiwenga also had ambitions of his own in 2017..

Tendi quotes a story that Chiwenga himself publicly disclosed in August 2016 when he changed his name to Constantino Guveya Dominic Nyikadzino Chiwenga. The story was that one of his great grandfathers died without fulfilling his wish to be a chief.

The ancestor had promised while on his deathbed that the then young Constantino Dominic would one day become a leader, a feat the dying grandfather himself had failed to achieve in his lifetime.

Chiwenga’s dying grandfather reportedly told him: “What I wanted to achieve (governing) I could not achieve but you are going to do it. You are Nyikadzino. You are Nyikadzino….you are going to fulfil that destiny.”

As the coup alliance between ED and Chiwenga spectacularly collapses before our very eyes, perhaps Chiwenga could very well still be actively pursuing his dying grandfather’s prophesy that may well have been his personal motive for mounting the 2017 coup.

In his engaging book, Tendi restates his position in his earlier thesis that the 2017 event in Zimbabwe was a coup in every respect as it met all the commonalities of coups held elsewhere, both geographically and historically.

He posits—perhaps convincingly so—that there was nothing unique, or exceptional, about the 2017 coup in Zimbabwe, contrary to postulations by some scholars and apologists that it was bloodless, a non-coup coup, a military-assisted transition or some such self-serving euphemisms.

Maybe the only unique coup, both from Tendi’s account and from a perusal of coup literature, was the1966 coup in Ghana that ousted Kwame Nkrumah as it was the only coup in which a sitting President was removed by the police and not the military.

But in 2017, Zimbabwe’s police commissioner Augustine Chihuri supported Mugabe. He was not necessarily G40 but as the book reveals, he did not support the coup because of his personal dislike of Mnangagwa.

He was actually pro-Mujuru, who she referred to as her niece.

As revealed in the book, Chihuri did not support Mnangagwa because he believed he was the one behind the falsified intelligence that had him imprisoned during the liberation war for attempting a coup on the leaders.

Chihuri, then a military training instructor, was detained from 1978 until the end of the liberation struggle in December1979.

His dislike of Mnangagwa can also be further explained by the fact that when he finally came out of detention in 1979, he found out that ED had been romantically involved with his lover while he was in prison!

As Tendi writes, Chihuri carried the stigma of having been a counter-revolutionary during the liberation struggle, a charge he had denied when the author interviewed him years back on 24 April 2015.

It was Finer (2002: 71) who said motives are not enough for a coup to happen. Coups need a catalyst—that special event that triggers the military armoury to be rolled out.

While there is a general agreement on the motivations and reasons for the 2017 coup, there are stark differences among scholars on the “Sarajevo moment”—-that special event that sparked the coup.

Tendi presents three different “triggers” from different scholars in his book but reiterates his position published in his earlier work about what he perceives to have been the trigger for the coup. He remains convinced that what catalysed the coup was Mugabe’s refusal on the morning of Monday, 13 November to shelve his commitments and meet with the military generals to address their expanding disagreements.

The second catalyst mentioned by other scholars was Mugabe’s dismissal of Mnangagwa on November 6, 2017.

However, for Jonathan Moyo, the coup catalyst was government and party spokesman Simon Khaya Moyo’s press conference on 14 November 2017 in which he accused the generals of having committed treason. For Jonathan Moyo, that press conference left the military with no option but to mount a coup.

But from where I stand as a scholar of political science, there is no reason to split hairs. I believe that all the triumvirate of perspectives are correct and that all the three cited events were catalysts for the coup.

My reason for vindicating all the three views is that the presumed notion that there can only be one catalyst to a coup or any political event is a misguided notion. This is because the concept of catalysis being used here is borrowed from the field of chemistry where catalysts are used to speed up chemical reactions.

But then in the realm of chemistry from where the concept is borrowed, there exists what is called tandem catalysm where more than one catalyst can be used to speed up a reaction, for example in the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide.

Similarly, I posit that just as in tandem catalysis in chemistry or multiple orgasms in the field of romance, there too can be multiple catalysts in political science and other social sciences.

So I believe all the three cited events, acting in tandem, helped catalyse the coup.

Indeed, and as noted by Tendi, Khaya Moyo’s press conference on 14 November 2017 may have been held while the military tanks had already been rolled out, but even in chemistry, another catalyst can be added to further speed up an already evolving chemical reaction!

The sponsorship role of diplomats to the coup also takes centre-stage in Tendi’s book, particularly, the presumed role of the British through its then ambassador; Catriona Laing who we all know had an overtly soft sport for Mnangagwa and deemed him to be a pragmatic reformist who could take Zimbabwe on a different path.

From Tendi’s research, almost all the ambassadors stationed in Harare at the time knew Laing was prepared to give ED the benefit of the doubt, having long told anyone who cared to listen well before the coup that ED would definitely succeed Mugabe.

There’s even a reported conversation in the book where Misheck Sibanda, the then chief secretary to the President and Cabinet was heard saying in Shona on his phone on 21 November 2017: “Chapindirwa ne MI6.” (meaning the MI6, the British Intelligence service, had entered the fray)

Tendi may be right that there is no incontrovertible evidence that the British had a hand. But the many nuances that he alludes to himself in his book as well as what many neutral observers saw happening on the ground at the time all seem to point to London having had a very active hand in the ouster of Mugabe in 2017.

In fact, I could add that unconfirmed reports in Harare at the time were saying the British had provided a consultancy firm that had exhorted the military to allow thousands of citizens to flood the streets of Harare, as later happened, so as to mask the fact that this was a coup but instead to give optical credence to the narrative that Mugabe had been “peopled” out.

And indeed, as Tendi alludes to in his book, the fact that at the time of the coup ambassador Laing was on leave while the embassy’s head of security was away in Zambia may all have been meant to create plausible deniability to allegations that the British had been complicit to the regime change that had just place in Harare.

The book also alludes to the fact that spirituality, through the role of rituals and mystical beliefs, also contributes to the cognition and understanding of coups as highly ideated events.

And I am tempted to believe that the role of rituals and mystical beliefs in masculinised accession politics–beyond just helping to explain coup dynamics, may also help us to understand the issue of Sekeramayi’s stolen clothes and the resultant lack of active will on his part to take over the Presidency.

The clothes may have indeed have been taken for rituals!

The active pursuit after the coup by Mnangagwa and his military allies to access Mugabe’s body after his death, even to the point of seeking to exhume it, may also be explained through Tendi’s prism of coups being spiritually ideated events.

He may now be away from the military, with generals aligned to him dead, demoted, retired or transferred but Chiwenga, who has his dying grandfather’s wish to fulfil, may yet still retain residual influence in the military where the ordinary soldiers are wallowing in abject poverty.

Coups beget each other. Forgive my sexist language which is a key element of the gendered bigotry highlighted in the book, but I posit that the prospect of yet another putsch should never be discounted since the country’s coup hymen was broken in November 2017.

In the words of Ruth First (1972): “The virginity of the army is like that of a woman; army men are fond of saying once assailed, it is never intact.”

Tendi’s book is a must read, not just for its refreshing scholarly perspective of all coups as gendered events, but as a treasure-trove for a deeper understanding of the underlying dynamics around Zimbabwe’s first ever putsch in the month of the goat in 2017.

It was a coup which, of course, stymied the informal Mexico Declaration and brought to an abrupt halt what had initially appeared to be the very real prospect of “His Excellency, President Sydney Tigere Sekeramayi” by December 2017.

Luke Tamborinyoka is a citizen from Domboshava. He is the former spokesperson to the late icon Morgan Tsvangirai. He is a journalist and a political scientist by profession. You can interact with Tamborinyoka on his Facebook page or on the twitter handle @luke_tambo