Hello, my president!
When Robert Mugabe fired Emmerson Mnangagwa last November, his vice-president knew his life was in danger. Close associates had refused to help him and Zimbabwe’s border posts were on high alert. In desperation, he turned to Justice Maphosa, a Zimbabwean-
On the day that Mnangagwa was fired by Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s vice-president, Justice Maphosa received a phone call while he was still at the office from Mnangagwa’s son, Emmerson jnr, at around 6pm. “Uncle, it’s Junior. My father wants to speak to you.”
“Give the phone to your father so that I can speak to him,” he replied.
“Hello comrade, how are you?” the former vicepresident said at the other end of the line. “Look, Maphosa, events have unfolded and I’m sure you are watching the news. I have been fired and I have been stripped of my bodyguards and I am now on the run. I’m going to try and find a way to run away from this, but it’s very hot and I need your help.”
Maphosa immediately offered to assist. But what Maphosa was unaware of at the time was that Mnangagwa had already tried unsuccessfully to leave the country. Close associates had refused to help him and his attempt to leave on medical grounds had failed to result in a swift response. The country’s border posts were also on high alert.
“Keep your phone on,” Mnangagwa said. “I will call you again in two hours because I am on the run. I will call you with a more secure line.”
Rescue plan hatched
Immediately after the conversation, Maphosa put together a rescue plan with his team of white security officers at his office who, he boasts, are highly skilled and professional. Under Maphosa’s direction a plan was hatched to track Mnangagwa’s possible movements based on the phone call that he had just made and to estimate how long it would take him to reach a suitable pick-up location. The plan was to collect Mnangagwa using Maphosa’s private plane from Beira in Mozambique and to
Justice Maphosa, left
land at Lanseria Airport near Johannesburg. A second plane was on standby in the event that an emergency situation developed and the rescue plan ran into trouble in Mozambique.
“I did all this planning in order to prepare myself, so that in case I lost them I knew where I could begin to hunt for them,” says Maphosa. “That was the next thing that I was going to do; if we lost him, we were going to send a search party to go and look for him. We wanted our president alive. We were prepared to go to Mozambique and look for him if we had lost him.”
For Maphosa, the acts of bravery during Zimbabwe’s liberation war, when ordinary people often took on huge personal risks to provide food and shelter to guerrilla fighters, came to mind at the time. It was this sense that he was contributing to a mission of liberation that was much larger than himself that emboldened Maphosa to involve himself in the extremely dangerous operation of
We wanted our president alive. We were prepared to go to Mozambique and look for him if we had lost him
helping Mnangagwa. There were plenty of risks. One was that the authorities in Mozambique could raise the alarm to their counterparts in Zimbabwe. South Africa could also make a move against Maphosa once their systems picked up that he was sheltering Mnangagwa from the government in Zimbabwe. Maphosa’s involvement could also have invited the wrath of Mugabe and might even have soured relations among the three countries in the region.
Maphosa dared not tell even his wife
It was because of all these associated risks that Maphosa decided not to inform his wife, when he arrived home in the early hours of Tuesday morning, that he was at the centre of an operation to assist Mnangagwa. As he got into bed, Maphosa held his wife closely and pretended that all was normal. “My wife didn’t know anything. I had not told her and I had made a decision that I