Didymus Mutasa, Zimbabwe’s minister of national security and head of the state police, is one of the country’s most powerful and feared officials.  Robert Mugabe’s right-hand man, he has a reputation for ruthlessness, callousness, and brutality.

One of his first projects after being appointed chief of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO)  early in 2005 was the infamous Operation Murambatsvina [Operation Drive Out the Filth], which sent soldiers to destroy the homes of over 700,000 people.

Mutasa presented Murambatsvina as a regeneration and renewal scheme to "clean up" urban areas. But most people who lost their homes were opposition supporters, and nearly a year-and-a-half later virtually nothing has been done to provide new homes for the estimated 700,000 to a million people who watched their houses being bulldozed, sledgehammered and set ablaze.

Anna Tibaijuka, the special envoy of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, lambasted Mutasa's operation as inhuman and a breach of national and international human rights laws.
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Quietly, in recent weeks, Mutasa has relaunched Operation Murambatsvina, with yet more humble homes being torn down in urban suburbs by powerful organs of state.

Many observers wonder if this is the same Didymus Mutasa who was active in the movement that ended white minority rule in Rhodesia, as it was then known, in 1979.

Fifty years ago he was a deeply Christian young man and black nationalist working round-the-clock on a multi-racial farm that was famous in liberation circles, and beyond, and hated by Rhodesia's white minority government.

He became a living legend among liberal Christians by helping to make Cold Comfort Farm into a first class agricultural training ground and a psychological liberation centre that was an early staging post on the long march from colonial oppression in Rhodesia to majority rule in Zimbabwe.

“A man of high integrity and Christian character,” said Guy Clutton-Brock, the Welsh-born champion of black freedom who became Zimbabwe’s first and only official white hero when President Robert Mugabe buried his ashes at Harare's Heroes Acre in 1996.

“He never feared to speak his mind and he was always a sensitive leader, a man of vision, an optimist with a profound belief in his fellow man regardless of race, colour, creed.”

He was regarded as a trustworthy and honest parliamentarian through the 1980s and 1990s.  In 2000, however, things began to change.  He was appointed anti-corruption minister around the time that Robert Mugabe unleashed his supporters to seize farms and dispossess their white owners.  Three years later, Zimbabwe’s economy was in a free-fall from which it has yet to recover.  Mutasa was ensconced on an eastern Zimbabwe farm, and he and other Mugabe cronies had enriched themselves by selling stolen farm machinery.

In 2004, he repeatedly kicked opposition MP Roy Bennett on the floor of parliament, a crime for which he received no punishment.  At Mugabe’s insistence, however, Bennett was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment.

Didymus Mutasa, once extolled as an honourable and self-sacrificing Christian, has become a corrupt and shameless sycophant for Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe seems to have a talent for co-opting Christian leaders, including Bishop Nolbert Kunonga and Archbishop Bernard Malango, both Anglicans, and Bishop Peter Nemapare of the African Methodist Church.  Fortunately, there are still some who have not bowed the knee to Baal, such as Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo Pius Ncube.

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