Many Zimbabweans remember Mugabe as their country’s liberator from white minority rule and praise him for broadening people’s access to education and land, will be buried at a private ceremony at a date still to be decided, his family said on Thursday, in an embarrassment for his successor who wants him interred at a national shrine on Sunday.
Mugabe is proving as polarising in death as he was in life, as the fight over where he will be buried threatens to undermine President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s former deputy who conspired to overthrow him. Leo Mugabe, the late president’s nephew, said the burial ceremony would be private, without saying where it would be.
The family issued a statement saying it was concerned about the manner in which the government was preparing the programme for Mugabe’s funeral “without consulting his immediate family”. “As long as ZANU-PF is in power and as long as I am leading, no one will deviate, you remain our icon, our commander and founding father,” Mnangagwa said of Mugabe, addressing relatives and associates in the room where the coffin draped in the Zimbabwean flag was being kept.
The body was expected to be on display at the stadium, the venue where he took his first oath at independence in 1980, for another day on Friday before a state funeral planned for the national sports stadium on Saturday.at the Rufaro stadium that he wanted Mugabe to be buried at National Heroes Acre along with other liberation fighters.