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Comedian's Chiwenga hospital visit picture goes viral

by ZimLive
04 Feb 2019 at 09:19hrs | Views
All for laughs … Comic Pastor outside the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town
Comic Pastor on Sunday caused an internet splash after pictures of him emerged showing the comedian outside a Cape Town Hospital where Vice President Constantino Chiwenga is being treated for an undisclosed ailment.

Accompanied by a friend, Comic Pastor donned a Zanu PF scarf – making sure he was not mistaken for a hostile visitor.

The comedian is not believed to have gone into the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, where the 63-year-old Chiwenga was checked in on Friday night, but merely posed for pictures outside the facility.

Comic Pastor was in Cape Town for a wedding and irreverently thought it would be a good sketch to pose as an official who had just visited the indisposed Zanu PF strongman. The pictures went viral on social media.

The government has remained tight-lipped about Chiwenga's medical flight, first revealed by ZimLive on Saturday.

In recent public appearances, Chiwenga has been seen with bandage straps on the back of his swollen hands, which doctors say points to ongoing treatment by injection. The bandage is meant to hide the multiple injection marks.

Chiwenga, who has been losing his skin pigmentation together with his wife, Mary, has claimed he was poisoned when he, as army commander, led a military coup that ousted former President Robert Mugabe in November 2017.

After receiving treatment for close to a month in Pretoria, South Africa, last October, the presidency said he suffered from "exhaustion" and unhealed injuries from the 1970s bush war for liberation.

The Groote Schuur Hospital conducted the world's first heart transplant, and Chiwenga's presence there has triggered speculation that he may have a heart ailment.

Chiwenga was taken ill on Wednesday after a Zanu PF politburo meeting and spent several hours at the Avenues Clinic in Harare.

By Friday night, his condition had deteriorated and he was flown out to Cape Town by private jet.

ZimLive has spoken to one hospital source who claimed he saw Chiwenga on Saturday in a corridor at the Groote Schuur Hospital chatting to Dr John Mangwiro, Zimbabwe's Deputy Minister of Health. That account would suggest that Chiwenga is not in any serious danger.

Source - ZimLive