WikiLeaks’s latest exposure of United States diplomatic cables, which includes revelations that top Zanu-PF officials have been secretly corresponding with US diplomats in Zimbabwe since 2000, have stoked tensions in Zanu-PF over the successor to President Robert Mugabe.
The party is now split between those exposed as having been in contact with American envoys and those demanding a purge of the “sellouts”.
A Zanu-PF politburo meeting in Harare this week is expected to tackle the thorny revelations and decide what action to take against the “traitors”.
Zimbabwe’s attorney general, Johannes Tomana, has threatened to prosecute the Zanu-PF leaders implicated in the leaks for treason, warning there would be no “sacred cows”.
Treason is punishable in Zimbabwe by death. However, this is seen as unlikely, given the number of high-level Zanu-PF officials and close Mugabe confidants implicated.
They include the country’s two deputy presidents Joice Mujuru and John Nkomo; central bank chief Gideon Gono; Zanu-PF spin doctor Jonathan Moyo; indigenisation minister Saviour Kasukuwere and former government minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu.
Zanu-PF insiders told the Mail & Guardian that Mugabe was in a “state of shock, disbelief and anger” over the leaks and the light they shed on the intimate relationship between his party lieutenants and the Americans.
The revelations cut short Zanu-PF’s excitement over the WikiLeaks cables last December, which it used to attack the opposition Movement for Democratic Change for its alleged imperialist ties.
The latest leaked cables indicate that among the topics discussed between US diplomats and Zanu-PF high-ups are Mugabe’s failing health, an exit package for the 87-year-old leader and succession plans for the party. However, it is a diplomatic cable linked to Gono and relating to Mugabe’s health that is likely to be the catalyst for party infighting.
In the June 2008 cable the banker is quoted as saying that Mugabe suffers from prostate cancer that has metastasised and that doctors had given him five more years to live.
Gono’s alleged statement has lent credence to persistent speculation about Mugabe’s health.
Gono has denied that he made the statement and other Zanu-PF officials have also denied the authenticity of the cables in a bid to save face, but political turncoat Jonathan Moyo has confessed to meeting former American ambassador Christopher Dell in 2007, while disputing the contents of some of the cables.
The WikiLeaks disclosures are likely to revive hostility between Zanu-PF and the US and undermine the recent fence-building efforts of the US envoy to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray, and Zanu-PF national chair Simon Khaya Moyo.