The funeral in Harare

When Wicknell Chivayo’s helicopter went down in the cane fields near Chiredzi, the nightclubs of Harare were playing his song. It was an anthem recorded by a young artist he had bankrolled, lyrics comparing him to “a sun that lights the poor.” The DJ pushed the volume to the ceiling. People in the crowd raised their glasses, the beer inside catching the neon light. Nobody knew that hours earlier, the rented helicopter had already become twisted metal scattered across the wilderness of southern Zimbabwe.

The news spread slower than expected. First a vague post on Twitter, then voice notes circulating in WhatsApp groups, finally the rolling ticker on state television. When it was confirmed that Chivayo, his wife Lucy, and two pilots were all dead, Harare’s reaction took on a strange, almost split-screen quality. In the walled mansions of Borrowdale, several men in black suits stood before a giant poster and gave interviews. On the poster, Chivayo wore a white suit, smiling broadly, his equally expensively dressed wife beside him. A young ZANU-PF social media influencer choked up on camera, saying he had lost his “mentor” and “father,” a man who taught him how to “fight for the President.” Two luxury SUVs sat in his garage, gifts from Chivayo, their paint still gleaming.

And a few kilometres away in Mbare, a group of young people gathered around a small television watching the news. When the anchor read out Chivayo’s name, someone whistled. Someone started clapping. A vendor selling fried chicken tapped his spatula against the edge of the pot and said one word: “Finally.” Nobody organised this celebration. It grew on its own, like mushrooms after rain — in bars, at bus stops, in the comment sections of social media. Chivayo’s life was a living contradiction, a walking history of Zimbabwe in miniature.

He dropped out of school at fifteen. His first job was as a wages clerk at a bus company. Later he traded cellphones, speculated on foreign currency in the black market, converting stacks of Zimbabwean dollars into US dollars during the worst days of hyperinflation. In 2005, he was convicted of money laundering and sentenced to five years. He served three. After prison, his fortunes took a sharp turn. He founded Intratrek and secured a contract for the Gwanda solar project — a government deal worth over $170 million. A parliamentary investigation later called the company a “briefcase entity,” describing it as a front used to attract investment. Intratrek received more than $5 million in advance payments, but the 100-megawatt solar plant never materialised. Only weeks before Chivayo’s death did the government issue a “notice to proceed,” giving him twenty-four months to finally build it. The Gwanda plant was never built. But it brought Chivayo into the President’s orbit. In 2018, Mnangagwa had publicly warned against doing business with “briefcase merchants,” even suggesting Chivayo should go back to prison. But within a few years, their relationship had become a “bromance.” There is a widely circulated photograph: Chivayo almost reclining on a sofa, Mnangagwa seated beside him, the posture as casual as if they were in his own living room.

That intimacy became even more visible during the 2023 election season. Investigative journalists found that South African supplier Ren-Form had drastically inflated its quotes, then transferred hundreds of millions of rand to companies linked to Chivayo. Chivayo denied all allegations. The anti-corruption commission later closed its investigation with little explanation. But to ordinary Zimbabweans, Chivayo was a symbol: he represented everything about how this country had been carved up by a tiny few. He gave cars to politicians, money to church leaders, monthly stipends to influencers — in exchange for a flood of praise on social media. Meanwhile, the people of Gwanda were still waiting in the dark for a power plant that would never come. So when the news of the helicopter crash arrived, what many people felt was a complicated, even unsettling sense of relief.

“He said he gave money to the poor,” a young man waiting for a bus in central Harare said in an interview. “But have you ever seen a poor person receive one of his cars? The only people I’ve seen get cars from him already had luxury cars.” Several people nearby nodded in agreement. After his death, various versions of the source of Chivayo’s wealth began to circulate. Kenya’s former Deputy President Gachagua claimed that Chivayo had been holding over $11 billion belonging to Kenyan President Ruto, that he had used private planes to transport money for Ruto, and even planned to use South Korean technology to manipulate Kenya’s 2027 elections. None of these claims had any evidence behind them, and Ruto himself publicly mourned Chivayo as a “dear friend.” But the fact that such rumours were believed at all says something: Chivayo’s lifestyle had always defied ordinary business logic. How does a former black-market currency dealer who once served prison time become, within a decade, a man who hands out luxury cars, flies in private helicopters, and sits shoulder-to-shoulder with the President? In Zimbabwe, no one could give the ordinary person a convincing answer to that question. And Chivayo’s true “legacy” only became clear after his death.

In February 2026, Zimbabwe’s cabinet approved a draft constitutional amendment, later known as CAB3. The bill extended presidential and parliamentary terms from five years to seven, pushed the next election from 2028 to 2030, and — most critically — abolished the direct election of the President, replacing it with a parliamentary vote. In September 2024, Mnangagwa had publicly said he knew when it was time to leave and told those urging him to stay to “drop the idea.” But on 7 July 2026, he signed CAB3 into law, extending his own term to 2030. Constitutional experts pointed out that Section 328(7) of the 2013 Constitution explicitly states that any amendment extending term limits “does not apply to a person who held the office before the amendment.” In other words, the drafters of CAB3 were trying to skirt that clause by making the extension apply “just so” to the incumbent President and sitting MPs.

What role Chivayo played in this process cannot be found in any official record. But in the months before his death, his name appeared repeatedly in contexts connected to CAB3. The social media accounts he funded were among the first to promote the “2030 Vision” slogan. The influencers he gave cars to were tasked with “shaping his reputation as a philanthropist” — and that same network was later used to manufacture public support for CAB3. He never cast a vote in Parliament. He never drafted a single clause. But he participated in the game in the only way he knew  with money, with connections, and with a propaganda machine he paid for out of his own pocket. Chivayo’s funeral was held in Harare. It was a big affair. Politicians attended. Pastors prayed. The artists he had funded performed. State television broadcast it live. But at the same time, outside the Zimbabwean embassy in London, a group of Zimbabweans was holding a different gathering. They held signs protesting CAB3, protesting the abolition of the presidential vote, protesting the “2030 Agenda.” One protester told a camera that he had chosen to come on Independence Day because “the freedom won in 1980 cannot be quietly sold off in 2026.”

In a Harare cemetery, Chivayo’s coffin was lowered into the ground. The one thing he had been best at in life was making everyone — from the President to street-level influencers — feel they owed him something. After his death, that debt relationship kept working: the people he had bankrolled were now using his name to stand behind the era he had helped usher in. And the people who never received a single dollar from him were scattered across the world, trying to stop that era from becoming permanent.

Chivayo would never know any of this. The patch of earth he lay in was dry, crowded, and bore no resemblance to the walled mansion he had lived in. But in a way, his life told the story of this country completely enough: how a man could walk from a prison cell to a President’s sofa, how he could buy other people’s silence with other people’s money, and how, when he finally fell silent, so many people could at last say what they had really been thinking all along.

Brian Murenza is a Zimbabwean based in the Diaspora. He writes in his personal capacity.