Déjà Vu: Paul Tungwarara is the ‘Second Coming’ of Grace Mugabe

HARARE – Zimbabwe has always been a stage for grand performances, where loyalty is the currency and proximity to power is the ultimate script.

In this enduring drama, a new actor has stepped into the spotlight, but his performance carries the haunting echoes of a character many believed had exited the scene.

Paul Tungwarara, the special investment adviser to President Emmerson Mnangagwa, has emerged not merely as a wealthy businessman in politics, but as a figure whose posture, diction, and very essence seem to channel the spirit of Grace Mugabe.

The comparison is not one of gender but of a distinct political genus: the influential insider who thrives on derivative authority, lavish indulgence, and public spectacle.

To understand the resonance, one must recall the final, frantic acts of Grace Mugabe’s political ascendancy.

In the years before her husband’s ouster, she transformed from a background figure into the fiery spearhead of the G40 faction.

Her rallies were not policy summits but dramatic displays of loyalty and liquidation.

She took to podiums with a combative posture, her diction a blend of populist vitriol and shallow personal attack aimed at rivals like Joice Mujuru and Emmerson Mnangagwa himself.

The substance was often thin, overshadowed by the spectacle—a performance designed to showcase her power as the president’s defender and to shape the succession battle through sheer force of personality and unbridled rhetoric.

It was politics as family drama, played out before the nation.

Now, observe Paul Tungwarara on the stump.

The stage may differ, but the choreography feels intimately familiar.

Facing corruption allegations and whispers of flight, his return to the public arena was not a quiet legal defense but a defiant rally in Zvimba.

His posture there was one of brazen confrontation, not contrition.

His diction, mirroring Grace’s own simplistic binaries, framed his troubles not as matters for the courts but as battles against shadowy enemies.

Most tellingly, he invoked a rhetoric of divine sanction for power that bypasses the people, declaring the president as appointed by and removable only by God.

This shallow yet potent claim to unassailable authority is a direct echo of the absolutist mythology that surrounded the Mugabe presidency, which Grace so fiercely championed.

Both performers understand that in certain political theaters, a grandiose, uncompromising claim to legitimacy can be more effective than a reasoned argument.

The parallels extend far beyond the podium into the very texture of their lives.

Grace Mugabe was synonymous with a life of penchant—for luxury shopping sprees in global capitals, for sprawling estates, and for an opulence that stood in stark contrast to the nation’s economic hardships.

Tungwarara lives a similar script, written in allegations of audacious financial dealings.

He has bought a private jet, a helicopter, top of the range cars and several mansions in Harare, South Africa and Dubai.

Her daughter spends thousands of dollars on shopping and she flaunts wealth on social media.

Tungwarara stands accused of swindling an Indian investor of millions for a property he did not own, of dodging substantial debts, and of leveraging his proximity to power to secure lucrative state contracts, such as the multi-million-dollar Presidential Borehole Scheme.

Tungwarara is accused of operating within a network of state capture involving inflated contracts, fraud, land seizures, and abuse of government programmes.

Allegations against him range from multi-million-dollar property and loan scams involving local and international businessmen to the controversial seizure of Mt Carmel Farm from the Shamuyarira family. His ride-hailing company, Tap and Go Taxis, is also accused of bypassing transport regulations, allegedly using political influence to operate outside the law.

Central to the controversy is Tungwarara’s Prevail International Group, which was awarded the Presidential Borehole Scheme but is accused by MPs of failing to deliver functioning boreholes despite receiving millions in public funds.

Parliamentarians across several constituencies report abandoned or substandard projects, while critics argue that Prevail continues to dominate tenders despite a record of non-delivery. Additional concerns surround proposed and rejected projects involving inflated costs and politically motivated housing schemes

His business persona has attracted labels like “Zvigananda,” a term pointing to those who amass wealth through cunning and connection.

Like Grace, his public role is inextricably woven with a narrative of controversial accumulation, suggesting that political influence is not a means to public service but a conduit for private gain.

This uncanny resurrection of a political archetype reveals a stubborn truth about the system itself.

The ecosystem that nurtured and elevated Grace Mugabe—a system that rewards performative loyalty, excuses financial impropriety, and confuses theatrical defiance for strength—remains fundamentally intact.

It did not expire with Robert Mugabe’s fall; it simply found new hosts. Tungwarara is not an anomaly but a symptom.

He demonstrates how the pathways to influence, the templates for public performance, and the tolerance for lavish excess have been recycled, not reformed.

The consequence for Zimbabwe is a deepening sense of political déjà vu, where the faces change but the play remains the same.

It fosters public cynicism, as politics is perceived as a closed game for the connected.

It carries a direct economic cost, as controversial tenders and alleged corruption drain vital national resources.

And it threatens stability, as inflammatory, zero-sum rhetoric poisons the well of political discourse and fuels internal factionalism.

The ghost of Grace Mugabe, it seems, did not need a séance to return.

It merely waited in the wings, ready for an actor with the right ambition to step into the role, proving that without a fundamental rewrite of the script, the same characters will always reappear, speaking slightly altered versions of the same lines.

Even as Paul Tungwarara loudly proclaims that he is “defending the President” and boasts that he is ready to die for him, political firebrand Ace Lumumba argues that Tungwarara is doing the exact opposite.

“The most dangerous enemy is not the one who opposes you out in the open, but the one who destroys you in your name.

“The bullet that comes from behind, wearing your uniform, shouting your slogans, undermining everybody that you trust in your name,” Lumumba argued in a video he posted on social media.