By Staff Reporter
PRESIDENT Emmerson Mnangagwa has appointed long-serving MDC MP Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga as the country’s ambassador to Sweden.
Before the new appointment, Misihairabwi-Mushonga was the MDC-T proportional representation MP for Matabeleland South in 2018.
She replaces Alice Mashingaidze who has been appointed Zimbabwe’s ambassador to Germany.
Lovemore Mazemo, a former chief director in the Foreign Ministry of Foreign Affairs will represent Zimbabwe in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Meanwhile, Mnangagwa has expressed shock at the death of Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to Iran, Christopher Mapanga.
Mapanga, who died Thursday in Harare has been accorded a state-assisted funeral.
“The sudden death on national assignment in foreign land of Ambassador Christopher Mapanga came to me as a great shock,” Mnangagwa said in a statement.
“A very diligent and experienced diplomat who served his country with undivided dedication and loyalty, Ambassador Mapanga joined Foreign Affairs as a junior officer barely a year into our Independence in 1981.”
He also served in Japan, Kenya, and Namibia in different capacities.
“Thereafter, government promoted him to the rank of Consul General to Johannesburg in South Africa, a station which by all counts is one of the busiest and most demanding,” he said.
“Before long, the late Ambassador would again be promoted and reassigned to Moscow, Russia, as Minister Plenipotentiary.” From 2014 until his death, Ambassador Mapanga had risen to become an Ambassador, serving Zimbabwe in Egypt before being redeployed to Tehran which became his last posting.
According to media reports from Tehran, Iran, he was reportedly suffering from liver disease.
It’s the second death of a foreign diplomat in Tehran in less than six months.
Last May, Iranian police started investigating the death of a Swiss diplomat who died after reportedly falling from a high rise in Tehran. The Swiss woman, in her 50s, fell from the upper floors of a 20-storey building in which she lived in northern Tehran, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.
Mapanga is survived by a wife and four children.
