By A Correspondent-Controversial businessman and convicted fraudster Wicknell Chivayo has resurfaced in the international spotlight after being named in the memoir of notorious British mercenary and former SAS officer Simon Francis Mann—a man once jailed for attempting to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea.
In Cry Havoc, his dramatic account of life in the shadows of global warfare, Mann describes sharing prison time with Chivayo, calling him “a smart chap.” However, this curious link between the flamboyant Zimbabwean tycoon and an international terrorist has since been quietly scrubbed from the public domain.
A since-deleted 2016 Sunday Mail article once sensationally claimed that Chivayo helped plot a hijacked plane escape for Mann from Zimbabwe’s Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison—an allegation that now sits on the boundary between fact and folklore.
Mann and 69 others were arrested on 7 March 2004 in Zimbabwe when their Boeing 727 was seized by security forces during a stop-off at Harare’s airport to be loaded with £100,000 worth of weapons and equipment.
This was the same time Chivayo was serving his fraud jail term.
Mann, who died last week at the age of 72, collapsed while exercising—an anticlimactic end to a life spent at the volatile intersection of money, militarism, and political subterfuge.
After serving in the British Army, Mann co-founded Sandline International, a private military firm notorious for murky operations in Angola, Sierra Leone, and Papua New Guinea. His name was cemented in African history with the 2004 “Wonga Coup”, a brazen plot to depose Equatorial Guinea’s longtime dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema and replace him with exiled politician Severo Moto Nsá.
Backed by high-level financiers—including Mark Thatcher, son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—the mercenaries’ plot was unravelled when their Boeing 727 landed in Harare to refuel and collect weapons from Zimbabwe Defence Industries. It was a fatal miscalculation.
Zimbabwe’s feared Central Intelligence Organisation, operating at the peak of President Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian rule, arrested Mann and 64 others—mostly veterans of South Africa’s notorious 32 Buffalo Battalion—before they could leave the tarmac.
The botched coup became a diplomatic windfall for Mugabe, who leveraged the arrest to solidify Zimbabwe’s alliance with Equatorial Guinea. To this day, Zimbabwe remains one of Obiang’s few close African allies—a loyalty marked by Mnangagwa’s solo attendance at Obiang’s 2022 inauguration and the mysterious gifting of a mansion in Malabo to the Zimbabwean state.
While Mugabe’s spies were efficient in protecting a foreign dictator, they were equally ruthless in stifling internal dissent. The same intelligence services that busted an international coup have long been accused of abducting activists, torturing critics, and harassing journalists back home.
Chivayo’s alleged proximity to Mann adds yet another controversial layer to his checkered reputation—one marked by lavish spending, political patronage, and criminal convictions.
Mann would later be extradited to Equatorial Guinea’s infamous Black Beach Prison, notorious for its torture chambers and inhumane conditions.
The legacy of that failed coup still haunts regional diplomacy—and now, unexpectedly pulls Chivayo’s name back into the shadows of global intrigue.
While Mugabe’s regime is long gone, the machinery of surveillance and repression remains intact. And for citizens, the line between protector and persecutor continues to blur in a state where truth is a threat, and silence is often safer than speech.