Herbert Ndlovu

Strategic Succession Move: Why Mnangagwa Prefers Retired General Phillip Valerio Sibanda As President Emmerson Mnangagwa manoeuvres through a complex and volatile political landscape amid his contentious 2030 term extension bid ahead of the ruling party's critical elective congress next year, his succession plans have become a central focus of Zanu PF and national politics. For the past three years, The NewsHawks has been hearing that Mnangagwa prefers Sibanda, a retired Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) commander, as his successor, from a personal, political and strategic perspective. Internal sources say Mnangagwa favours Sibanda over Vice-President Constantino Chiwenga, Vice-President Kembo Mohadi, multi-millionaire tycoon Kudakwashe Tagwirei or even Chris Mutsvangwa for many reasons. Chiwenga and Tagwirei have been manoeuvring in public to position themselves in the succession race. But Tagwirei, who has money but no political capital, has denied that he has any presidential ambitions. Mohadi has never expressed any ambition and is generally not considered a contender. In fact, Mohadi wants to retire and has been pushing to do so for the past coup of years mainly on old age and health grounds. He feels tired and that it is time for him rest. That has created an opening for Sibanda. Besides, Zanu PF and Zimbabwe's ethnic and regional politics - tribal political calculus - put Mohadi at a disadvantage. Mutsvangwa has completely avoided fielding himself in the race despite his fierce attacks against Chiwenga, his relative and nemesis. In this succession matrix, it has emerged that Mnangagwa wants Sibanda for various reasons: To have a friendly and reliable successor to protect himself, his family and interests after power; someone from his regional-ethnic axis; and a person with liberation struggle credentials. Sibanda, a decorated Zipra and national army commander, is close to Mnangagwa. He has proved reliable to him, especially after thwarting the January 2019 and March 2025 coup plots to keep him in power. Chiwenga and his military-backed Zanu PF wanted to oust Mnangagwa in 2019 and 2025, but were stopped in their tracks by Sibanda as army commander. It is recorded in Mnangagwa’s book A Life of Sacrifice: A Biography - Emmerson Mnangagwa, authored by Eddie Cross and published in 2021, that Chiwenga tried to seize power in January 2019 while the President was away in Russia and Eastern Europe, but was stopped by Sibanda. Last year, during the Blessed Geza phenomenon, Sibanda advised Mnangagwa to quickly remove Zimbabwe National Army commander retired Lieutenant-General Anselem Sanyatwe and make him Sports minister ahead of the planned March 30 uprising. The plan was to rein in the army and allow a popular uprising against Mnangagwa as the military stood by or joined the people like what previously happened in Sudan or Madagascar, among other countries. This makes Sibanda, who retired in November last year, a dependable ally for Mnangagwa. He also fits the regional-ethnic profile, an advantage and disadvantage. This brings proximity and loyalty, while it fuels the embers of Zanu PF and Zimbabwe's tribal politics deeply influential in the succession matrix. Sibanda is from Gokwe in Mnangagwa’s Midlands political stronghold and his widely regarded as an ethnic Karanga with connections to minorities in that area. The Shangwe are the traditional inhabitants of the Gokwe area which has Shona, Ndebele and Tonga ethnic influence. Sibanda is said to be connected to Mnangagwa through their Shumba totem, common among Karangas. His Sibanda surname, a result of Ndebele cultural influence, is derived from the Shumba totem. Some members of the Mnangagwa family, which had Ndebele influence as narrated by the President himself whose name at birth was Nhlupheko (from which his middle name Dambudzo is derived), use Sibanda as their surname. Inhlupheko is a Ndebele/Zulu noun meaning suffering, poverty, or severe hardship; Dambudzo in Shona.

People are misunderstanding this issue completely. Zimbabwe is not reversing the entire land reform programme. These are specific farms protected under Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements, BIPPAs, signed between Zimbabwe and foreign countries. Many of these farms were bought after independence, not during colonial rule, and their expropriation violated legally binding agreements that Zimbabwe itself had signed. What happened in 2000 was chaotic, violent, and deeply political. Mugabe had just lost the constitutional referendum in 2000 and his grip on power had weakened significantly. ZANUPF was facing growing opposition from a restless population, particularly people who supported the party and were angry that they still did not have land 20 years after independence. To regain political control, Mugabe latched onto the land issue and unleashed a fast-track land reform programme that was often violent and lawless. The tragedy is that while the principle of land reform itself was necessary because of colonial land imbalances, the implementation became corrupted. Productive farms were handed to political cronies, chefs, military elites, judges, and connected individuals, many of whom could not farm. Some received multiple farms while genuinely capable black farmers were sidelined. Even today, some of that land is being rented back to white commercial farmers because the beneficiaries failed to utilise it productively. Zimbabwe’s agriculture has never fully recovered from that chaos. The country destroyed an advanced agricultural system without putting in place a competent replacement system based on productivity, financing, skills, irrigation, and accountability. You cannot build agricultural success by simply handing land to politically connected people who have no farming capacity. So what the government is doing now is not a reversal of land reform. It is trying to correct a legal and economic mess it created 26 years ago by violating its own laws and international agreements. It was criminal for the Zimbabwean government to sign BIPPAs and then ignore them when it became politically convenient. The important question now is not whether the farms are being returned. The important question is who currently holds those farms, whether they were being used productively, and what happens going forward. I can guarantee you that many of those farms were not being fully utilised anyway. Land must be in the hands of people who can actually produce. That is why I always say to countries considering land reform that land cannot simply be taken and distributed randomly. Even in precolonial African kingdoms, land belonged to the king and was allocated to people who could use it productively. You did not automatically get land simply because you belonged to the kingdom. I always use my own example. I was the third biggest Boer goat breeder in Zimbabwe, operating from just two acres at my ancestral village, yet producing far more than all Zimbabwean farmers sitting on massive commercial farms except for only two. Had I been given access to proper farming land, which I would have bought, I would probably have become the number one goat breeder in Zimbabwe. But that opportunity never came because productive land was often allocated to the wrong people for political patronage rather than agricultural competence. Robert Mugabe and ZANUPF’s chaotic and violent land reform programme was not really designed to build a productive Zimbabwean agricultural society. It became a political patronage system. Of course, some ordinary Zimbabweans benefited from the land redistribution, but the system was structured in such a way that land ownership often depended on political loyalty to ZANUPF. If you spoke against the government, you risked losing that land. Many black Zimbabweans have lost farms over the years simply because they fell out of political favour. That alone tells you that this was never truly about empowering citizens equally under the law. It became a tool of political control. And as we saw during the divorce case involving Mugabe’s daughter, she was given 21 farms. One person with 21 farms in a country where millions were supposedly land hungry tells you everything about how chaotic, corrupt, and mismanaged the entire programme became. Land reform was supposed to correct colonial imbalances and create productive black commercial farmers. Instead, in many cases, productive land was captured by politically connected elites, multiple farm owners, and people without farming expertise, while genuinely capable farmers struggled to access land. The current leadership in Zimbabwe, the President, the Vice Presidents, and many men and women of the old guard will not be in power in ten to twenty years’ time. They will all be gone. A new generation will eventually take over, and a lot more will be done to restructure Zimbabwe’s agriculture and bring back sanity, productivity, professionalism, and proper land utilisation. No country can build a strong agricultural sector on political patronage, chaos, and fear. Eventually, competence and productivity will have to matter more than political connections. It is embarrassing that with all that productive commercial farming land not being put to proper use, Zimbabwe now has to import maize from South Africa. That alone tells you how badly the agricultural sector was damaged. And unfortunately, the Zimbabwean example is now making many South Africans fearful of land reform because they look across the border and see collapse instead of increased productivity. But Zimbabwe should never be used as the standard example of proper land reform because what happened there was not a properly planned agricultural transformation programme. It became a violent, chaotic, and corrupt political project driven largely by patronage and power retention rather than long-term agricultural productivity and economic sustainability. Real land reform should increase production, strengthen food security, empower capable farmers, and grow the economy. It should not destroy a country’s ability to feed itself. Zimbabwe has capable black farmers, those are the ones that should have been given access to land not these grifters who are renting out famers and running protection rackets.

I am not a man given to alarm. Forty years of military service teaches you to distinguish between the noise of politics and the tremors that precede genuine collapse. I have seen both. What I am witnessing in Zimbabwe today is the latter. The rot is no longer deniable. What the people have taken to calling Zvigananda the looting class, the untouchable beneficiaries of proximity to power has metastasised from a complaint whispered at growth points into a national crisis visible from every capital on this continent. Markets that should be feeding families are cornered. Contracts that should be building schools are eaten. Land that belongs to the nation is being parcelled out to Tagwirei and his Cartel the connected while war veterans who bled for this soil die in poverty. This is not governance. This is extraction dressed in the language of patriotism. I have watched, with growing unease, how those who raise these concerns are managed rather than answered. This is not the Zimbabwe that General Josiah Magama Tongogara died for. This is not what the liberation cost us.I must say what many are thinking but few with anything to lose will say publicly Vice President Constantino Guveya Dominic Nyikadzino Chiwenga remains the most consequential figure standing between Zimbabwe and the Mobutu trajectory. I choose those words carefully. Not the most powerful. Not the most popular. Consequential because the question of his role is one that history will not allow us to defer indefinitely. General Chiwenga is not a politician by formation. He is a soldier. And soldiers understand something that politicians have forgotten that institutions exist to outlast individuals, and that when individuals begin cannibalising institutions for personal enrichment, the state itself is at risk. It was precisely this understanding that animated November 2017. Whatever one's view of the method, the diagnosis was correct. The patient the Zimbabwean state was in crisis. The tragedy is that the operation treated one symptom and left the disease untreated. Zvigananda did not begin with the previous administration and it has not ended. It has merely rebranded. New names, same logic access equals immunity, proximity equals impunity. The presidential borehole is sunk next to a ministerial farm. The hospital refurbishment tender goes to the connected company Prevail International Group. The solar scheme benefits those whose first phone call can reach the highest office in the land.I am not a naive man. I do not imagine that any single leader however principled can cure by force of personality what is structural corruption. Systems are what discipline individuals. But systems require political will to enforce, and political will requires leadership with both the moral clarity and the institutional authority to act. That combination exists today in one figure. General Chiwenga carries within him the credibility of the liberation struggle, the respect of the military institution, and crucially the scar tissue of a man who has seen the consequences of unchecked power up close. He knows what it costs. He has paid some of that cost personally. History does not offer Zimbabwe unlimited opportunities for course correction. Nations that reach the Mobutu inflection point where the state and the looting class become indistinguishable rarely recover without convulsive pain. The question is not whether Zimbabwe corrects course. The question is whether it does so before or after the convulsion. I say this not as a partisan. I have no faction, no benefactor, no ministerial ambition.