Harare, Sept 21: Zimbabwe's Vice President Simon Muzenda died, President Robert Mugabe announced in a speech broadcast on state radio. "Comrade Muzenda passed on this afternoon at Parirenyatwa Hospital where he had been hospitalised for quite a while. The nation has suffered a great loss indeed," Mugabe said yesterday.
Muzenda, 80, was one of two Vice Presidents in the southern African country and a vanguard of Mugabe's ruling Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).
He played a significant role in Zimbabwe's 1970s war for independence from white minority rule in the then Rhodesia.
Muzenda, a former teacher and carpenter and a member of the country's main ethnic Shona group, had been ill for some time and had been to China to receive treatment.
"It is where he received his last attention before being brought back home four weeks ago," a sombre Mugabe said.
It is not clear what ailment Muzenda was suffering from.
State media earlier this month claimed Muzenda was making a remarkable recovery, denying private media speculation that he was on a life support machine.
Born on October 22, 1922 in Gutu, southern Zimbabwe, Muzenda trained as a teacher and taught in Bulawayo, the second largest city.
He became involved in nationalist politics in the 1940s. In the 1950s and 60s he was imprisoned on various occasions by the colonial powers in what was then southern Rhodesia. Bureau Report