Spotlight -Chiwenga is battling for his life in South Africa, where he was flown for medical treatment last month. Media reports say the former Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) Commander, was airlifted to a private hospital in Pretoria on June 23, where he is reported to be in critical condition and facing “his darkest hour”.
According to military sources, a deserter within the country’s Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) leaked the information and plot on Chiwenga’s life, suggesting that the VP could have ingested a small dosage of the unnamed poison when his table was served with appetizers.
“It was meant to be a quick operation, but someone developed cold feet because the dosage was said to be very little and it was served with the vice president’s appetizers,” said one of the sources who works close to the vice president’s office. “This happened some time last year, when the VP was invited for lunch together with the president at Rainbow Towers Hotel in the capital. We are told he (Chiwenga) is lucky to be still alive, because the full dosage was supposed to be served with his main meal, but the people involved aborted their mission because the president would have been the first to eat the food.”
Those close to Chiwenga, including family recently told the media that, they now believe he was also poisoned through potable water delivered to his home, as the mystery of the VP’s illness and health woes deepen.
Spotlight was the first publication to report on Chiwenga’s poisoning saga on 15 February 2019. At the time, army officials suspected the VP of suffering from the lethal polonium- 210 poisoning, and had rushed him to an undisclosed Indian military hospital, for urgent medical attention.
A photograph of the embattled Prophetic Healing and Deliverance Ministries (PHD) leader Walter Magaya dining with Mnangagwa and Chiwenga at Rainbow Towers hotel surfaced online last year, and it is not clear whether or not the incident is linked to the latest revelations on the VP’s alleged hotel poisoning.
Chiwenga’s predecessor, Phelekezela Mphoko, made headlines during his term in office when he stayed at the Rainbow Towers presidential suite for 587 days, gobbling a daily US$1 023 bill, until moving out to a US$2 million Highlands mansion in Harare.
-Spotlight Zimbabwe
