From Mujuru to Baloyi: How Zimbabwe’s power struggles are fought through character assassination

“When a hyena wants to eat its children, it first accuses them of smelling like goats.” – African proverb

By any measure, the recent barrage of accusations by Temba Mliswa against Mrs Miniyothabo Baloyi-Chiwenga reads less like a conscientious exposé and more like a deliberate smear campaign, tailored to serve a factional narrative within Zimbabwe’s turbulent political landscape.

In the tradition of ZANU PF’s internecine politics, where character assassination is often the weapon of choice, Mliswa’s interventions must be examined with an eye for evidence, logic, and motive.

What emerges upon inspection is not a case built on proof, but a patchwork of unsubstantiated claims, speculative reasoning, and personal vendetta dressed in the garb of moral outrage.

To begin, Mliswa’s public statements claim that Miniyothabo Baloyi-Chiwenga, a serving officer in the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, is conflicted by virtue of her marriage to Vice President Constantino Chiwenga.

He argues that she should retire from the military, alleging that her continued service undermines institutional integrity.

Yet, in the same breath, Mliswa has never demanded similar accountability for Sean Mnangagwa, the son of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who also serves in the military.

If the argument is truly about conflict of interest, then consistency requires that both be subjected to the same scrutiny. The glaring contradiction exposes the political selectivity of Mliswa’s reasoning.

As the African proverb goes, a mosquito that perches on a man’s scrotum receives the softest slap. What he terms a conflict of interest for Baloyi becomes, by convenient omission, a non-issue when it concerns the First Family.

In essence, this reveals that his criticism is not rooted in principle but in factional allegiance, a common hallmark of Zimbabwean political discourse where fairness is often sacrificed at the altar of expediency.

A second and far more sensational claim by Mliswa is that Miniyothabo Baloyi-Chiwenga was responsible for the mysterious power outage during President Mnangagwa’s State of the Nation Address. This accusation is extraordinary and should, therefore, require extraordinary proof.

Mliswa, however, offers none. There are no technical reports, no security briefings, and no verifiable intelligence to substantiate the claim. It is a pure assertion, one that exploits the dramatic optics of the event to construct an image of sabotage.

In a country with a long history of using security incidents to frame internal rivals, such allegations are not novel. They are strategically designed to generate suspicion, isolate the accused, and create grounds for institutional purging.

Without evidence, this claim cannot stand as journalism or patriotism; it is political theatre masquerading as whistleblowing.

Mliswa further accuses Baloyi of leaking his personal passport information and an associated boarding pass to the public. This, again, is unaccompanied by any traceable proof.

The Central Registry and immigration systems are managed by multiple layers of authority, and access to passport data is not within the standard operational purview of military intelligence officers.

Moreover, Mliswa has provided no documentation or whistleblower testimony linking Baloyi to the leak. In the absence of verifiable evidence, this allegation collapses under the weight of its own improbability.

It serves, however, an important psychological purpose: to cast Baloyi as an omnipresent, manipulative force capable of bending state systems for personal or political ends.

This kind of vilification is central to smear campaigns – it blurs the line between accusation and evidence until perception itself becomes conviction.

The fourth charge, that Baloyi runs parallel structures within the Military Intelligence Directorate (MID), is perhaps the most audacious.

Such a claim would imply that a serving officer, acting without official sanction, has managed to create a rogue intelligence apparatus within one of the most tightly monitored organs of the state.

Mliswa provides no institutional confirmation, no corroborating witnesses, and no intelligence sources to validate this extraordinary claim. It relies entirely on insinuation.

Ironically, such accusations have historically been levelled against those whom the political elite seek to delegitimise before removing them from proximity to power.

It is the classic ZANU PF template: first allege the existence of parallel structures, then use those allegations to justify dismissal or isolation.

The same was said of Joice Mujuru in 2014, when she was accused of plotting to assassinate Robert Mugabe and of running her own command within the party. No proof was ever produced, yet the smear achieved its purpose. She was expelled, her political credibility shattered.

When viewed through this historical lens, the pattern surrounding Mliswa’s allegations becomes unmistakable. Smear campaigns in Zimbabwean politics are not about truth; they are about power management.

They operate by amplifying whispers, personalising institutional disputes, and creating moral panic around targeted figures.

The similarities between the treatment of Baloyi-Chiwenga and that of Joice Mujuru are striking. Both women were portrayed as manipulative insiders, accused of disloyalty and power ambition.

Both were attacked through the media by surrogates who claimed to be acting in the national interest. And in both cases, the underlying motivation appears to be factional, the struggle over who controls the corridors of influence around key power centres in the context of succession politics.

The precedent stretches back even further. Before Mnangagwa himself ascended to power, he was subjected to an almost identical barrage of unfounded allegations in the months preceding his 2017 dismissal as vice president.

Then, the state media ran stories accusing him of witchcraft, of plotting a coup, and of undermining party unity.

None of these claims were ever substantiated. Yet, the damage was political rather than factual; the accusations succeeded in justifying his expulsion and the reconfiguration of internal loyalties.

It is a method perfected within ZANU PF, a Machiavellian process of manufacturing treason to sanitise succession politics.

Ironically, Mnangagwa’s own faction later weaponised the same tactics to legitimise the November 2017 coup. His Lacoste loyalists propagated the narrative that Mugabe was intent on anointing his wife, Grace, as successor.

The story was repeated endlessly to rally the military and public opinion around the coup, framing it as a patriotic correction rather than a power grab.

Yet evidence that has since emerged shows that Mugabe’s preferred successor was not Grace, but Dr Sydney Sekeramayi, a long-serving Defence Minister and liberation stalwart.

The “Grace succession” story was, therefore, a deliberate fabrication designed to create outrage, justify military intervention, and provide a moral shield for the takeover.

The very architects of that narrative now sit in judgment over others accused of precisely the same kind of political manipulation they once perfected.

Smear campaigns have been a recurring feature of Zimbabwe’s political life. Even Robert Mugabe’s former ally and the founding leader of ZANU, Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, fell victim to such fabrications.

When Sithole returned to Zimbabwe from exile in the United States in 1995, he faced false allegations of plotting to assassinate Mugabe. The claims were spurious, yet they were used to criminalise and silence a veteran nationalist who had long fallen out of favour.

He was convicted on those charges despite the absence of compelling evidence, effectively ending his political career.

As with Mujuru, as with Mnangagwa before his coup, and now as with Baloyi, the goal was never to establish truth but to erase political legitimacy through character destruction.

Against this backdrop, Mliswa’s performance should be recognised for what it is: a political manoeuvre dressed as moral crusade. It appeals to public frustration with corruption and nepotism but provides no factual scaffolding to support its claims.

Instead, it weaponises public trust against specific individuals, particularly women in proximity to power, who are often cast as the source of instability. In this sense, Baloyi’s vilification follows a gendered pattern as well.

Powerful women in Zimbabwean politics have consistently been targeted with narratives of manipulation and seduction, as if their influence cannot exist without moral compromise. This is not investigative activism; it is a patriarchal instrument of delegitimisation.

The absence of proof is therefore not accidental. It is essential to the architecture of the smear. Evidence can be challenged, but rumour feeds on emotion. Mliswa’s statements have gone viral precisely because they rely on insinuation, not verification.

They invite audiences to “connect the dots,” a phrase often used in political propaganda to mask the absence of fact. Once the seed of suspicion is planted, truth becomes secondary.

In that sense, smear campaigns thrive not because they are believed, but because they are repeated. Every repetition turns speculation into folklore.

What is also worth noting is the timing. Mliswa’s renewed attacks coincide with intensifying factional tensions between the Mnangagwa and Chiwenga camps, as the succession question once again unsettles the party.

In this context, Baloyi becomes the perfect proxy target. By discrediting her, one indirectly undermines Chiwenga himself. It is a politically efficient strategy: attack the personal to weaken the institutional.

The media outrage that follows then creates pressure for disciplinary or procedural review, giving political rivals a veneer of legitimacy to act.

This is the same strategy used against Mnangagwa in 2017 and against Mujuru in 2014. It is a tactic designed to simulate moral rectitude while executing political warfare.

In the end, Mliswa’s allegations crumble under analytical scrutiny. They offer no proof, no coherence, and no accountability. They rely entirely on emotion, factional alignment, and the manipulation of public sentiment.

The contradiction regarding Sean Mnangagwa exposes bias; the power-outage claim collapses without evidence; the passport leak story lacks procedural plausibility; and the notion of parallel intelligence structures is operationally absurd.

Yet these claims are effective precisely because they are not meant to be proven. They are meant to be believed. That is the essence of the smear: to convert rumour into truth through repetition.

To defend evidence-based reasoning in Zimbabwe’s political culture is not to defend any individual but to uphold the principle that accusations must be proven.

Once a society abandons that standard, it enters a moral twilight where truth becomes whatever is most politically convenient.

Mliswa’s rhetoric may thrill his followers and unsettle his opponents, but it contributes nothing to the discipline of accountability. Instead, it reinforces the culture of suspicion that has long paralysed the state.

The lesson from history is clear: when political discourse is driven by smear rather than scrutiny, institutions decay.

Mugabe used it to destroy his rivals; Mnangagwa was a victim of it before becoming a beneficiary; and now the same playbook appears to be unfolding once more.

Until Zimbabwe learns to separate truth from theatre, power from propaganda, and evidence from emotion, the politics of the smear will continue to define its leadership transitions. And in that, every citizen becomes both audience and casualty.