General Chiwenga Not A Soldier In Character: CIA Report

Zimbabwe’s Vice President Retired General Constantino Chiwenga has always been a politician who knows very little about military activities a CIA report said.

A Wikileaks cable 10HARARE7_a addressed to  America’s CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2010 said of Chiwenga, “The Commander of the Defense Forces, General  Constantino Chiwenga, is a political general who works hard, but who has very little practical military experience or expertise.

“A political commissar before 1980, he has only attended one mid-level training course, which he did not complete.  If given a choice between a military and a political issue, he routinely defaults to the political.

“His goal is to be in politics when his tenure ends as defense chief, and he will be very disappointed if he fails to achieve that goal.  He has been given to making political statements.  This has caused some ZANU-PF politicians to be suspicious of him, and he was chastised by Robert Mugabe for being too political.”

The cable also says a former United States Ambassador met privately on January 5 2010 with Brigadier General Herbert Chingono, the then Inspector General for the ZNA.

Chingono told the Ambassador that once Chiwenga called a meeting of senior officers that started at 10:00 in the morning and went on until 9:30 pm, which discussed economics and politics, but not once did a military issue come up.

He said that near the end of the meeting, as he consulted his notes, he turned to a colleague next to him and asked, “Why have we not discussed how to teach soldiers to shoot straight, how to better feed and clothe them?

Chingono said the question was, a purely rhetorical question, as, given a choice between a military and a political issue, Constantino Chiwenga will always chose the political because he doesn’t know enough about the military to be comfortable discussing it.

-Agencies