By Diana Rose Wairumbi
The Zimbabwean anti-corruption commission on Monday disclosed that it was probing the circumstances surrounding the controversial awarding of a doctorate to former First Lady Grace Mugabe.
The University of Zimbabwe’s vice chancellor Levi Nyagura defended the institutions decision to award Mrs. Mugabe her PhD, dismissing allegations that she did not write her own doctorate thesis, which was issued while former president Robert Mugabe was chancellor of the university.
According to state-owned Herald newspaper, Nyagura maintained that the thesis had been at the university library since 2014 and those making the accusations were “ignorant messrs and doctors” and do not have the capacity to supervise a PhD student.
“There is no way that they could have supervised the candidate because a doctorate is not done by a teaching department. It is done by a post-graduate centre,” said Prof Nyagura.
He dismissed accusations that the thesis was not in the library until this year, saying it was put up at the university library in 2014.
“Those are all lies. The thesis has always been in the library since 2014,” he said.
Prof Nyagura also stated that Mrs. Mugabe’s thesis was supervised by the two professors, who also supervised former Vice President Joice Mujuru.
The controversy was sparked by reports that the university’s sociology department teaching staff had challenged the accreditation of the PhD, after failing to find any record of Mrs. Mugabe as a student.
Academics in both South Africa and Zimbabwe last week described Mrs. Mugabe’s PhD as “the greatest academic fraud in history”, adding that it did not meet the minimum standard for a doctoral thesis.
The former First Lady was awarded the doctorate in sociology by the UZ in August 2014, three months after enrolling into the University.
The thesis was posted on the university website last month, four years later. Since then, it has become an intense controversial subject.
