The head of Zimbabwe’s influential war veterans association, Chris Mutsvangwa,said the plan of President Robert Mugabe to instal his wife, Grace as vice president, will be resisted.

“This is a coup by marriage certificate ….and it will be resisted,” he told Reuters.

Grace, who was a typist in Mugabe’s office before she became Mugabe’s wife, is likely to be installed the country’s vice-president when the ruling ZANU-PF holds its national convention next month.

Mutsvangwa ruled out trying to remove Mugabe by force and said war veterans, who had publicly backed the sacked Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa and broke ranks with the president last year, would form a broad front with the opposition in elections next year.

“We don’t want to abuse the military to resolve a political problem. We don’t want them to become the arbiter of political power,” Mutsvangwa said.

Mnangagwa has not been seen in public since his dismissal from government but his ally Mutsvangwa said he was “safe and beyond the reach of the assassins”.

Mugabe himself said on Wednesday the route to leadership was long and full of “pitfalls and death”, as he accused his fired deputy and former protege of showing impatience in his bid to succeed him.

Addressing supporters at the headquarters of his ZANU-PF party in Harare, 93-year-old Mugabe accused Emmerson Mnangagwa of consulting witchdoctors and prophets as part of a campaign to secure the presidency.

Mnangagwa, who was sacked by Mugabe on Monday and expelled from the ruling Zanu-PF party on Wednesday, said he had fled Zimbabwe because of death threats and was safe.

“My sudden departure was caused by incessant threats on my person, life and family by those who have attempted before through various forms of elimination including poisoning,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.

Mutsvangwa, said that Mnangagwa, 75, would travel to Johannesburg in neighbouring South Africa “very soon”.

Mugabe said Mnangagwa, nicknamed “Crocodile”, had made the same mistakes as Joice Mujuru, who was the president’s deputy for 10 years until she was fired in 2014.

“You should not try to say because the journey is long, then I should take a short cut to arrive quickly. The road has lions. There are pitfalls. There is death, beware,” he said.

“There is no short cut to being the leader of the people. Just as there was no short cut to our independence.”

ZANU-PF would move to discipline Mnangagwa’s “co-conspirators”, Mugabe added.