Rhodes Had a Business Plan — Does Zimbabwe's Ruling Elite?
Adapted for ZHRO from an original commentary by Tendai Ruben Mbofana, "At least Rhodes had established business interests: where are own ruling elite acquiring their wealth?" Mbofana is a Zimbabwean social justice advocate and writer. Follow his commentary on WhatsApp or contact him directly on +263 71 566 7700 /
There are some comparisons that simply make no sense — and one making the rounds in Zimbabwean commentary lately is among them. It's the loose equation of Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company's colonial-era plunder with the wealth being amassed by Zimbabwe's current ruling elite.
As Mbofana argues in the commentary this article draws on, the comparison collapses under its own weight — not because Rhodes deserves any rehabilitation, but because of what set his enterprise apart even in its worst abuses: it was visible. Rhodes raised private capital, built mines, laid railways, founded towns, and left behind a corporate structure — the BSAC — that could be chartered, audited, and eventually held to account. Whatever one thinks of how that wealth was extracted, its provenance could be traced.
Zimbabwe's post-independence elite, the argument goes, cannot say the same.
A case study with a paper trail — of a different kind
The clearest illustration currently before Zimbabwe's courts is the case of Kelsea Tadiwa Tafirenyika, the 22-year-old wife of Collins Mnangagwa — one of President Emmerson Mnangagwa's twin sons, and by marriage the president's daughter-in-law.
According to court papers, prosecutors allege Tafirenyika accumulated a portfolio of roughly 19 properties and a fleet of luxury vehicles — including Lamborghinis, Bentleys, a Rolls-Royce, a Jaguar and a Land Rover — with a stated combined value of approximately US$9.35 million, acquired between January 2023 and August 2026. The state's case is that this wealth came not from any declared business but from proceeds of dealing in controlled substances, including pethidine hydrochloride, morphine sulphate and cannabis. She was arrested, briefly released on US$1,000 bail, and rearrested within hours on the fresh money-laundering charge.
In fairness to due process, none of this has been proven in court. Tafirenyika denies the drug allegations, and reporting on the case has been careful to note that the asset figure is what appears in the state's own schedule, not a judicial finding. But it is precisely the shape of the allegation that Mbofana's argument turns on: a 22-year-old with no visible commercial enterprise, suddenly the beneficial owner of a multimillion-dollar property and vehicle portfolio. Whether or not the drug-trafficking allegation is proven, the underlying puzzle — where did this money actually come from? — is one that, unlike with Rhodes, no one can currently answer with a mine, a factory, or an export ledger.
The wider pattern: Gold Mafia
Mbofana's piece situates cases like this within a broader pattern he calls "gold mafia syndicates and cartel monopolies" — a phrase that isn't merely rhetorical. It refers to a real, well-documented scandal.
In March 2023, Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit aired a four-part undercover documentary series titled Gold Mafia, built on dozens of undercover operations across three continents and thousands of documents. The investigation showed senior figures — including Uebert Angel, then Zimbabwe's ambassador-at-large for Europe and the Americas, and his associate Rikki Doolan — offering to use diplomatic cover to smuggle large sums of cash into Zimbabwe, launder it, and convert it into gold for export, all while claiming the scheme had the president's knowledge. Separately, the documentary showed Henrietta Rushwaya, president of Zimbabwe's Miners Federation and a niece of President Mnangagwa, helping facilitate a gold purchase for the undercover reporters. Angel was also recorded offering an introduction to the president for a "$200,000 appreciation fee."
Following the exposé, Transparency International called it a demonstration of the urgent need to combat corruption in Zimbabwe, noting it followed a 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index score of just 23 out of 100 for the country. Zimbabwe's government said it would investigate the individuals named. Gold accounts for close to half of Zimbabwe's exports, which is precisely what makes control over its trade — official and illicit alike — such a significant source of unaccountable wealth.
This is the systemic backdrop against which individual cases like Tafirenyika's should be read: not as isolated incidents, but as data points in a pattern that investigative journalism has already mapped in detail.
"Criminals surrounding the president"
Mbofana's reference to unfulfilled 2017 promises to target "criminals surrounding the presidency" points to a theme that has resurfaced repeatedly in Zimbabwean politics since Mnangagwa took office. At his 2017 inauguration, Mnangagwa pledged that "acts of corruption must stop forthwith" and that "there should be no sacred cows." Nearly a decade on, that promise has become something of a bitter refrain among his own former allies.
Most notably, in September 2025, Vice President Constantino Chiwenga submitted a dossier to ZANU-PF's Politburo alleging that criminals surrounding the president were corrupting the ruling party — a document that reportedly implicated fuel conglomerate Sakunda Holdings and its business dealings. Separately, war veterans' leader Blessed "Bombshell" Geza has publicly accused "corrupt gangsters and hangers-on" around the president of abusing national resources, arguing that the promise of 2017's "Operation Restore Legacy" — to end nepotism and the privatisation of state resources — has gone unfulfilled.
Whether these accusations reflect factional infighting within the ruling party, genuine anti-corruption concern, or both, they reinforce the same point Mbofana is making from outside the system: the language of "criminals surrounding the president" is now something even the president's own inner circle uses about itself.
Why this matters
The Rhodes comparison works as commentary precisely because it refuses to let either side off the hook. It does not defend Rhodes — colonial plunder is not in question. But it insists that even an extractive, exploitative enterprise left behind an audit trail: mines that can be pointed to, a company that could be chartered and investigated, infrastructure that outlived its founder by more than a century.
What Zimbabwe's citizens are being asked to accept today, by contrast, is wealth without a story — luxury portfolios with no declared business behind them, gold flows documented by international journalists rather than domestic institutions, and promises to root out corruption that have, by the testimony of the president's own deputy, gone unmet.
For ZHRO's purposes, the throughline across these three threads — the Tafirenyika case, the Gold Mafia revelations, and the unmet 2017 anti-corruption pledge — is accountability. Rhodes could be held to account because his enterprise was visible. The question this piece leaves standing is whether Zimbabwe's institutions — its courts, its Anti-Corruption Commission, its own ruling party — are willing or able to make today's opaque wealth equally visible.
This article draws on and credits the original commentary by Tendai Ruben Mbofana. Additional context on the Gold Mafia investigation and the "criminals surrounding the president" allegations has been added by ZHRO for background and is sourced to Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit, Transparency International, The Sentry, and contemporaneous news reporting. The allegations against Kelsea Tafirenyika remain before the courts and are described here as allegations, not established fact.