Wife charged with attempted murder of Zimbabwe vice-president

The estranged wife of Zimbabwe’s vice-president has been charged with attempting to murder him.

Marry Chiwenga – already facing corruption charges – has been denied bail in Harare.

It’s alleged that she tried to kill General Constantino Chiwenga while he was receiving medical treatment in South Africa.

It started as a simple, but dramatic, case of alleged corruption: the estranged wife of Zimbabwe’s vice president, arrested and accused of money laundering and fraud.

The case was presented as proof of the country’s new commitment to clean governance, after the misrule of the Mugabe era.

But then came the news that Marry Chiwenga was also being charged with trying to kill her husband – the army general who overthrew Robert Mugabe.

He alleged that she’d tried to prevent him from getting medical treatment in South Africa, and had even pulled an intravenous drip out of his arm in hospital.

Regardless of the specific details – in the eyes of many this case now fits a more familiar pattern, of a country where corrupt elites accuse each other of assassination plots and poisonings, and where the police and courts are used to settle scores.

A country, in other words, where precious little seems to have changed since the days of Robert Mugabe.

That sense is compounded by Zimbabwe’s deepening economic crisis – the country gripped by hyperinflation, crippling power-shortages, and mass hunger.

vanguard

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