Zimbabwe’s president Mnangagwa accused of rape

A 33-year-old woman has filed a police report in Queensland, Australia, accusing Zimbabwean president Emmerson Mnangagwa of raping her when she was 15.

Susan Mutami told police that Mnangagwa – then a cabinet minister – pursued her after meeting her during an interschools competition in 2003. She was in Form 2.

Mnangagwa, 79, eventually took her into his home in Kwekwe when her father died in 2005.

She claims the Zanu PF leader, who became president after a military coup in November 2017, raped her several times over many years.

Mutami filed a report at the Mount Ommaney police station, a division of Brisbane police, on Monday morning under case number 4026120.

It remains unclear how Australian police will handle the report, with Mnangagwa out of their jurisdiction and banned from travelling to the country due to sanctions.

A spokesman for Mnangagwa dismissed the allegations as “gossip.”

George Charamba told ZimLive: “It would be remiss of me to dignify gossip.”

Before filing the police report, Mutami spoke at length about the abuse on Twitter. She said Mnangagwa warned her he was “very powerful” and could make her disappear if she went public.

She has now decided to speak out, she says, after she was arrested during her last visit to Zimbabwe following the death of Sibusiso Moyo, her ex-boyfriend and father of her child who was Zimbabwe’s foreign minister.

Mutami said it was Moyo, a former army general, who put a stop to the abuse by Mnangagwa after vowing to “protect her.”

The mother-of-two was detained by police and state intelligence agents for two days in February 2021 while leaving Zimbabwe, and later released without charge.

“He killed me at 15, I’m not scared of dying. If they want to kill me, let them go ahead. But no-one lives forever,” Mutami said on July 22.

Mutami said she was a young and naïve schoolgirl in 2003 when she greeted Mnangagwa during an interschools athletics competition at Loreto High School in Silobela. Mnangagwa, then the minister for national housing, had been invited as a guest of honour.

She said she was surprised when Mnangagwa told teachers that she was her niece. Mnangagwa allegedly handed her Z$3 million in bearer’s cheques and told her to visit him at the Zanu PF office in Kwekwe.

She would not meet him until 2004 during the second term school holiday when she was now in Form 3, she said.

“He was parked in town at a BP service station. When he saw me he said, ‘I’ve been looking for you’,” she remembers.

He allegedly invited her for lunch at the Golden Mile Hotel. She said the late Midlands governor Cephas Msipa and current local government minister July Moyo were present as they sat down for their meal of fish and chips.

Mnangagwa allegedly told Msipa and Moyo that he had something to discuss with his niece in private, before leading her to a room where he raped her before telling her: “I love you. Keep it between me and you.”

Mutami said this was her first sexual experience and it “hurt so bad.”

They returned to where Msipa and Moyo sat, she said, before Mnangagwa ordered his driver to take her home.

She claimed Mnangagwa sent one of his aides, Owen Mudha Ncube – who would later become state security minister in his government – to deliver groceries to her school. Ncube also tried to leave her Z$2 million in bearer’s cheques but school authorities said it was “too much money.”

When her father died in a car accident in 2005, Mutami said Mnangagwa bought groceries at the funeral and also started paying her school fees. Mnangagwa invited her to live at his Sherwood farm home after telling her it was “not safe at her home.”

Ncube allegedly drove her to the farm. Mnangagwa arrived late at night and sent for her.

“He took me to a bedroom upstairs normally used by her children. He again raped me. He said ‘I missed you my fresh blood’,” Mutami claims.

In the morning, she met Mnangagwa’s wife, Auxillia, for the first time.

“She asked me who I was, and I said I was her husband’s niece. She said I know all his relatives and accused me of lying. She said ‘I know girls like you, you’re sluts after my husband’s money.’ She punched me in the face,” Mutami recalls.

After the incident, she says she decided to return home, giving the excuse that she wanted to pick up some clothes at her parents’ house in Mbizo, a suburb in Kwekwe. Ncube was called to accompany her.

“He drove to Jesse Gardens Lodge and raped me,” Mutami accuses Ncube, who was sacked for undisclosed reasons by Mnangagwa as minister in January this year.

She was eventually returned to the farm where she alleges the abuse by Mnangagwa continued.

“He raped me most nights,” she said. “Sometimes he would take me and say we are going to inspect the fields. He would stop the car and ask me to give him a blow job, but I didn’t know how to do it. On one occasion I accidentally bit him,” she claims.

To prove her claims, Mutami says Mnangagwa has a birth mark on the inner left thigh and another on one of his butt cheeks.

Mutami said during her stay at the farm between 2005 and 2007, she once tried to tell his wife, Auxillia, about the abuse, but Zimbabwe’s future first lady refused to believe her.

“She told me I smell like urine, and boasted that ‘my husband has classy bitches, not you’.”

Mutami’s mother, a nurse, left Zimbabwe for Australia in 2006, and processed paperwork for her daughter to join her. She left Zimbabwe in 2007.

She returned to Zimbabwe twice between 2007 and 2010, and on both occasions she said Mnangagwa sent people to pick her up from the airport and booked her at the Meikles hotel in Harare.

Mnangagwa “got very angry”, she said, after she asked him to stop the abuse as she regarded him as a “father figure.” He also bristled with rage when she asked him to wear a condom after she heard rumours that he was HIV positive, she alleges.

In 2010, she said she met Moyo – then a middle-ranking soldier in the army – and he promised to protect her. They fell in love and had a child together, a boy.

Moyo, who was married to Justice Loice Matanda-Moyo, the head of the country’s anti-graft agency, died in January 2021 – but not before he told Mutami that he had been poisoned, she claims.

Mutami has named a string of people she says know about the abuse, including the former first lady Grace Mugabe and current Zimbabwe Defence Forces Commander Lieutenant General David Sigauke.

Source: zimlive.com