A chartered plane that is expected to airlift former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s remains left Zimbabwe for Singapore on Monday.
The plane left Harare early Monday and on board were government officials and relatives. However, until today it was not clearly spelt out where the former leader would be buried, a family spokesman said on Monday.
Leo Mugabe, the late president’s nephew and family spokesman told Reuters that Mugabe’s body was expected to arrive in Zimbabwe on Wednesday at 3 p.m. (1300 GMT).
In August the local newspaper in Zimbabwe reported that the late leader while in a hospital in Singapore had told his next of kin that he did not wish to be buried at the National Heroes Acre monument in Harare but instead wanted to be interred in his home village.
If Mugabe is buried in Kutama village, 85 km (50 miles) from Harare, it would be a major rebuke for his successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, and the ruling ZANU-PF party that Mugabe helped to found.
Mugabe died on Friday aged 95 in Singapore, where he had long received medical treatment. He had dominated Zimbabwean politics for almost four decades from independence in 1980 until he was ousted by his own army in a November 2017 coup.
Mugabe is revered by some as a liberator who freed his people from white minority rule, but he is also vilified by others who say he wrecked one of Africa’s most promising economies and ruthlessly crushing his opponents.
