Buyanga's ex-wife complains over magistrate

BUSINESSMAN Frank Buyanga's former wife Chantelle Muteswa has filed a letter of complaint to Police Commissioner-General Godwin Matanga, the Judicial Service Commission and the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission challenging cancellation of Buyanga's warrant of arrest by a Harare magistrate.

Muteswa says cancellation of the warrant of arrest, which led to Buyanga's release from a South African remand prison was a potential act of corruption by provincial magistrate Learnmore Mapiye, who she now wants investigated.

She says she received a letter from Buyanga on October 27, through his lawyers Rubaya and Chatambudza Legal Practitioners over a matter she was never seized with.

Mapiye then allegedly dispatched her subordinate magistrate Judith Taruvinga, who is stationed at Civil Courts through an email to go to Rotten Row Magistrates Court to sit and hear Rubaya's application for Buyanga.

"I am advised that Mapiye's initial instruction was for the warrant to be cancelled in chambers and not in open court. Although I was not copied that letter, which I got wind of from well-wishers who were aggrieved by the preferential treatment of Sadiqi (Buyanga), and, or his legal practitioners, I instructed my legal practitioners to advise Mapiye and the Chief Magistrate of the folly of the proposed course of action and object to it in a letter dated 28 October 2022. This was done," Muteswa wrote.

"Sometime around 14 November 2022 around 1435 hours, my legal practitioners received a telephone call that an application for the cancellation of the warrant issued on 24 April 2020 was being heard. I have now become aware that the purported application had been brought that morning, served on the State, it had been set down for 1415 hours and was being heard. My legal practitioners were advised that the prosecutors at Rotten Row were ignorant of how the matter had been set down. It is now clear that a document titled "notice of set down" had been brought by Rubaya and Chatambudza directly and exclusively to Mapiye to the utmost exclusion of the Clerk of Court - a procedure which I am told is unknown to our court process."

Muteswa said she had found the action by Mapiye to be out of order, and demanded investigations by authorities.

Buyanga was issued a warrant of arrest for kidnapping his son and he was placed on Interpol red notice as a result.

The businessman was then arrested and remanded in custody at Sun City Correctional Facility in South Africa pending his indictment.

However, his Zimbabwean lawyer Admire Rubaya filed the cancellation of the warrant of arrest before a Harare magistrate citing that it was issued in error, and the application was upheld by magistrate Taruvinga.