HARARE – Founding president Robert Mugabe had “advanced cancer” when he died in hospital in Singapore on September 6, President Emmerson Mnangagwa has revealed.
The former guerilla leader, who died aged 95, came to power at the end of white minority rule in 1980 and ruled Zimbabwe uninterrupted for 37 years and seven months.
He was toppled in November 2017 in a military-backed coup, ending an increasingly iron-fisted rule marked by political oppression and economic ruin.
Mugabe’s health deteriorated rapidly after the ousting and he made regular trips to Singapore to seek treatment.
Mugabe had advanced cancer, and had to be taken off chemotherapy treatment because it was no longer effective, according to Mnangagwa who was addressing Zanu PF supporters in New York last Saturday.
“Doctors had stopped chemotherapy treatment because of age and also because the cancer had spread and it was not helping anymore,” said Mnangagwa.
“He would have come back home, but the family said they wanted to remain. Of course, they would have wanted me to come to Singapore, but also we had our Vice President General (Constantino) Chiwenga, who is in a military hospital in Beijing, who was going into a major operation.”
Mugabe’s nephew Leo Mugabe told AFP he had “no comment on that”.
The government had previously downplayed Mugabe’s frequent trips to Singapore as necessary for cataract treatment.
In 2011, whistle-blower site Wikileaks published a diplomatic cable that said Mugabe had prostate cancer.
The cable, written in 2008 by the US embassy in Harare, said the former president had five years left to live at the time.
Mugabe is expected to be buried next month at a monument for national heroes in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. – AFP
