There's a reshuffle coming in the Mugabe cabinet - and shuffling off is one of this blog's favourite characters
It's always sad to say goodbye to old friends, especially those who make us laugh. So it gives me no pleasure at all to announce the almost immediate departure of our helpless, hapless and hopeless Minister of National Security, Didymus Mutasa.
Yes, good old Didymus, a man who once nursed secret ambitions to be President himself, is on his way out. Showing him the door is, of course, his boss, our boss, everyone's boss, President Robert Mugabe. Expect an announcement before Christmas.
Didymus doesn't want to go. He doesn't want to leave those plush offices at Chaminuka House, the official headquarters of his ministry and its chief organ, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). But when Big Bob says you got to go...you got to go.
Truth to tell, Didymus is overdue the sack. He's been hanging on to his job by the skin of his teeth for some time now. On top of general incompetence, he recently embarrassed the whole country by believing he had found a magically inexhaustible supply of diesel, springing from the living rock. He only just survived that disgrace, and regular readers will know it gave us all a good laugh.
But now he's put his foot in it again. One of his remits is the lands, land reform and resettlement ministry that deals with farm allocations and redistribution. While he was just throwing the whites off their farms, all was well. But recently, in an excess of zeal, he did much the same to a group of war veterans.
Anyone with half a brain - which excludes Didymus of course - would know that firstly, war veterans are supposed to be the beneficiaries of land reform, not the victims, and secondly, that our President is proud of his war veterans and won't have a word said against them or a dirty deed done to them. Inevitably Mugabe got to hear of Mutasa's faux pas, went ballistic, called in the erring minister, and told him to pack his bags.
When I said at the top of this that I regret Mutasa's going, my feelings are partly coloured by the knowledge of who is ear-marked to take his place. My fellow Zimbabweans will know who I mean when I say it is... Ngwena! The Crocodile.
Emmerson Mnangagwa (above right), to give him the name on his identity card, is one scarey man. It's enough to know that his other nickname is the Butcher of Matabeleland, because he masterminded the Gukurahundi massacres, in which thousands of the country's Ndebele minority died.
Mnangagwa has had his squabbles with Mugabe in the past. But now, as the new Minister of State Security, he will join Bob in a two-pronged attack on their mutual enemies; by which I mean the opposition MDC of course, but also, and just as implacable, the Mujuru faction within their own Zanu-PF.
Retired General Solomon Mujuru and his wife Joyce, who is one of our vice presidents, are looking to control Mugabe's exit and his replacement. And they are sworn enemies of the crocodile.The resulting in-fighting promises to be vicious.
It's possible to take a sanguine view of the situation and say that Mugabe and Mnangagwa, being both bloody-thirsty tyrants, deserve each other, and that they both deserve the Mujurus. But then, what about the rest of us? Do we deserve any of them?
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