Zimbabwe stands at a crossroads it has walked before, and those with eyes to see already know the destination.
General Constantino Chiwenga will be the next President of Zimbabwe and First Secretary of ZANU-PF.
This is not speculation. It is the trajectory of events already in motion, visible to anyone who has studied how power actually moves in this country not through communiqués and press statements, but through the quiet repositioning of loyalties within the party’s structures.
Even within Mnangagwa’s own inner circle, this reality is understood, even if it cannot yet be spoken aloud.
No faction, no cartel, no constitutional maneuver has proven capable of altering what the structures of this party and this military ultimately decide.
History does not repeat. It rhymes and we have heard this rhyme before.
Munhu wese kuna amai.
In the final days of the Mugabe era, the G40 faction gathered around Amai Grace Mugabe, believing proximity to State House and to the First Family was the surest path to succession.
They neutralised Lacoste-aligned officials one by one, believing themselves untouchable because they held the ear of the President.
We all remember how that ended not in triumph, but in the ignominy of November 2017, watching the very apparatus they mocked dismantle their ambitions in a matter of days.
Now we are witnessing the same tactic, deployed by the very man who once stood on the other side of that history.
The neutralisation of Lacoste stalwarts, the marginalisation of war veterans who fought for this country’s liberation, the elevation of a “Zvigananda” cartel whose loyalty is to proximity and patronage rather than to the party’s founding principles this is G40 in a new uniform.
Different faces, same fatal miscalculation.
Those who forget history are not condemned to repeat it. They are condemned to relive its ending.
What befell the G40 architects will befall the architects of this current arrangement.
The military does not forget who stood with the liberation struggle and who did not.
The structures that removed one president in 2017 in defence of the party’s founding values remain intact, and they remain watchful.
Mnangagwa would do well to remember that he did not create the system that brought him to power he inherited it, and he serves at its pleasure, not the reverse.
A leader who turns that same system against the very comrades who installed him is not securing his legacy.
He is authoring its shameless end.
It pains me to say this, but the truth does not die.
Retired Lieutenant General Winston Sigauke Mapuranga.
