Mudede finally leaves

He has been taken to court multiple times, losing repeatedly. His views on citizenship, and on allowing mothers or fathers to register births in the absence of one spouse, were always less about the Constitution than they were about his patriarchal and personal conservative beliefs.

A traditionalist and firm believer in ancestral worship, Mudede is considered an elder member of the Hwata clan, from which the perhaps the most famous of the Mbuya Nehanda mediums, Charwe, originated.

To some critics, he owed his long stay in government, way beyond retirement age, to this connection.

This was, after all, a government with a mystical streak.

After Mugabe was swept out of power in a palace coup last November, expectations were that a coterie of his enforcers like Mudede, who had had an arthritic grip on government for decades, would go with him.

Hopes were raised when former Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa announced in December that government would send all civil servants above retirement age home.

But these hopes were dashed when, days later, then Public Service Minister Petronella Kagonye told Parliament that Mudede was on a contract which government was renewing annually. She also cited an African Union protocol which seeks to eliminate “discrimination against older persons with regard to employment opportunities.”

Appearing before a Parliament committee earlier in 2018, MPs asked Mudede to reveal his age. He refused. “It is a highly personalised question,” he angrily retorted.

Mudede’s continued stay in a key government office did cost Mnangagwa and his ‘new dispensation’ some political capital as nothing screamed ‘old order’ louder than the Registrar-General.

Away from office, Mudede’s other interest – apart from hunting and boxing – was genetically modified organisms and reproductive politics. With his friend and co-conspirator Richard Hondo, Mudede penned a book: “Genetically Modified Organisms and Population Control Drugs in Developing Countries.”

Contraceptives are nothing but a conspiracy by the West to check population growth in Africa and the developing world, to ensure continued underdevelopment, they argued in the book.

In one radio interview, Mudede declared: “Contraceptives interfere with God’s biological plan for women. They are a ploy by powerful nations to weaken Africa.”

The Ministry of Health had to issue a statement, dismissing his statements as “totally false”.

Dabbling with reproductive politics did nothing to improve Mudede’s standing with women’s rights activists.

His penchant to overstay, or stay long, was also evident in his other favourite pursuit. With his close friend Hondo, Mudede controlled the Zimbabwe National Boxing and Wrestling Control Board for more than 33 years.

But, as Mudede showed, boxers who stay too long often suffer serious damage. – The Source

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