Joyce Mujuru
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Joyce Mujuru (born 1956) is a Zimbabwean politician, who serves as a vice-president of the Zanu-PF party, alongside fellow vice-president Joseph Msika and president Robert Mugabe, taking a position left vacant following the death of Simon Muzenda. This puts her in line to succeed Mugabe, if he retires in 2008. Along with her husband, Solomon Mujuru, and other Zanu-PF party members, she is the subject of personal sanctions imposed by the United States. [1]
Mujuru was born in Zimbabwe's northeastern district of Mt. Darwin, a Shona from the Zezeru language group. (Many Zanu-PF party leaders, including Mugabe and Msika, are also from this area.) After completing two years of secondary education, she decided to join Zimbabwe's war of liberation. She downed a helicopter with a machine gun on February 17, 1974 after refusing to flee.
- "Incredibly, I hit the machine and there was a lot of black smoke and it crashed. A big explosion followed," she was quoted as saying of the incident in which all the occupants of the helicopter perished.
She took the nom-du-guerre Teurai Ropa (spill blood), and then rose to become one of the first women commanders in Mugabe's ZANLA forces. In 1977 she married Solomon Mujuru, known then as Rex Nhongo, deputy commander-in-chief of ZANLA.
The Mujurus now live on a 3,500-acre requisitioned farm, Alamein, 45 miles south of Harare, which has been found by the Supreme Court in Zimbabwe to have been illegally requisitioned from the farm owner. [2]
[edit] Government career
At independence in 1980, Mujuru became the youngest cabinet minister in Mugabe's cabinet, taking the portfolio of sports, youth and recreation. She fitted secondary school in between her busy schedule after she was appointed minister.
As minister of telecommunications, she tried to stop Strive Masiyiwa from establishing his independent cellphone network Econet [3]. Masiyiwa had been given an ultimatum by the cabinet to sell his imported equipment to his rivals. On March 24, 1997, Mujuru decided to issue Zimbabwe's second cellular telephone license to the previously unknown Zairois consortium Telecel [4], cutting out Masiyiwa. The Zairois consortium included her husband Solomon and President Robert Mugabe's nephew Leo. After many legal fights, Masiyiwa won his licence in December 1997, while Telecel's was cancelled.
In 1998, Mujuru was named among senior officials who looted the Zimbabwe War Victims Compensation Fund.
[edit] Vice-presidency
The ruling party women’s league, resolved at its annual conference held in September 2004 to put forward a female candidate for the party’s vice-presidency, a position left vacant following the death of Simon Muzenda.
Mugabe bowed to pressure from a ZANU-PF faction led by Mujuru's husband, General Solomon Mujuru, to give a woman the second vice-presidency post -- effectively sidelining speaker of parliament Emmerson Mnangagwa, widely seen as his favoured heir. This Zanu-PF reshuffle was dubbed “the night of the long knives” by the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation. [5]
