Vice President helps minister’s wife skip murder charge

By Lance Guma
11 October 2007

The patronage system that keeps Mugabe’s regime together came out clearly this week when Vice President Joseph Msika helped a minister’s wife escape the murder charges she was facing. The wife of Finance Minister Samuel Mumbengegwi was arrested at the end of September after allegedly leading a group of ten soldiers in fatally assaulting Fibion Mafukidze, a former farm worker accused of stealing from their farm in Mupandawana. The Minister and his wife Tecla Mumbengegwi grabbed the Irvins Farm from Mr Fraser, a white commercial farmer. This however did not stop Tecla taking the law into her own hands to deal with someone who allegedly stole from ‘their’ farm.

The deceased villager’s family refused to bury the body, demanding compensation from the Mumbengegwi family. A report by the Zimbabwe Times says they demanded 100 cattle and Z$10 billion. It’s only after Msika’s intervention that the murdered villager was buried on Sunday. The Vice President attended the funeral in an attempt to placate the family. Police meanwhile have now dropped charges against both Tecla and the nine soldiers charged with the murder. In a strange twist to the case, one of the soldiers implicated is reported to have committed suicide whilst in police custody. The rest have gone back to their barracks at 42 Infantry battalion headquarters in Masvingo.

Officer commanding Masvingo Province, Assistant Commissioner Charles Makono, told the Zimbabwe Times; ‘we are no longer investigating that case since the feuding families managed to reach an agreement over the weekend.’ Adding more controversy is the fact that no post-mortem of the body was conducted, suggesting police were receiving instructions from higher up on how to handle the matter.