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TOMORROW delegates from the country’s 10 provinces converge in Harare for Zanu-PF’s 6th National People’s Congress that is expected to usher in a new leadership that will be seized with ensuring accelerated implementation of Zim-Asset in line with the Congress theme.

Missing from the party will be the cabal aligned to Vice President Joice Mujuru, that used the cover of Zim-Asset to go around Zimbabwe on factional business with the aim of deposing President Mugabe at all costs, stopping at nothing, even assassination.

This is why it has been so near and yet so far for VP Mujuru who, as Zanu-PF second secretary and vice president, was so near the President but was so far from everything that epitomises the man she was supposed to understudy over the past 10 years going by the serious allegations levelled against her.

Soon after her elevation to the vice presidency in December 2004, VP Mujuru began scheming against President Mugabe culminating in the abortive attempt by Mash East to revolt against President Mugabe at the National People’s Conference held at Goromonzi High School in December 2006.

A year later the Mujuru project mooted a revisionist biography on Cde Edgar Tekere in which they maligned President Mugabe as a prelude to launching the Mavambo project in 2008. Through Mavambo, VP Mujuru went on to sponsor the self-defeating “Bhora musango” that split the vote for President Mugabe, who ended up nearly losing to MDC-T’s Morgan Tsvangirai but for the constitutional proviso requiring a contestant to score 50 percent plus 1 of the votes cast for an outright victory.

The dysfunctional inclusive Government then followed with VP Mujuru getting quite cosy with the MDC-T which she worked with, at times in violation of the Zanu-PF position.

Cases in point are her collusion with MDC-T vice president Thokozani Khupe to vote in Goromonzi MP Beatrice Nyamupinga as leader of the Women’s Parliamentary Caucus at the expense of Cde Monica Mutsvangwa, who had been selected by the Zanu-PF parliamentary caucus; and the election of MDC-T’s Lovemore Moyo as House of Assembly Speaker with the blessing of some Zanu-PF MPs.

So cosy was the VP in the inclusive Government that she abetted the MDC-T bid to block the harmonised elections that were constitutionally due, only becoming unstuck when the Constitutional Court ordered elections by July 31 last year.

President Mugabe, with First Lady Amai Grace Mugabe by his side, then single-handedly addressed highly subscribed rallies countrywide earning himself and the party a victory much bigger than the 1980 landslide.

No sooner was Zanu-PF firmly ensconced in Government did VP Mujuru start scheming with an eye on Congress.

This explains the manipulation of the election of provincial chairpersons and Rugare Gumbo’s boast that VP Mujuru was in control of eight provinces.

VP Mujuru was not done as she also took her vote buying and manipulation to the Youth and Women’s League conferences which President Mugabe described as filthy.

The anti-Mugabe lobby was only checkmated by the Women’s League decision to approach the First Lady to assume its chairpersonship. Amai Mugabe then revealed the kind of person the Vice President is, and the rest, as they say, is now history.

Equally disturbing were reports of secret meetings the VP held with ambassadors of hostile countries. She held most of these meetings when she was left in an acting capacity, and in one such meeting she reduced herself to the level of house help for the US ambassador by working the kitchen for him.

Despite having been preceded by towering luminaries like Dr Joshua Nkomo, Dr Simon Muzenda, Cde Joseph Msika and Dr John Landa Nkomo, VP Mujuru remained the proverbial dwarf in giant robes as she learnt nothing from them.

In fact, she expressed contempt for her predecessors when she; as Minister of Information, Posts and Telecommunications; described Dr Nkomo as “a senile old man’’ after he had called her to order over the issue of a mobile licence for Econet.

Dr Nkomo’s words endure true to the Shona adage, “miromo yevakuru haiwire pasi”, as Dr Mujuru is today hoist by her own petard.