THE TROUBLE WITH CALLING CHIVAYO’S DEATH A JUDGEMENT
By Gabriel Manyati
Advocate Thabani Mpofu looked at the wreckage of Wicknell Chivayo’s helicopter and saw a verdict. In his post of 4 October he wrote that the violence of the death “was not ordinary. It was brutal, deliberate and devastating.”
He went further: “To me, the violence carried the terrible hallmarks of judgment; vicious and absolute.” He admitted he did not know whose judgement it was, yet he still treated the missing head, the scattered body parts and the garbage bags as evidence that accountability had finally arrived. The post ends with a question that has since circulated widely: “So who’s next?”
That framing is powerful. But it is also a mistake.
Chivayo died with his wife and three other people when a Bell 430 helicopter came down at Kudenga Farm near Marondera on the evening of 30 September. The impact and fire left remains so badly damaged that heads have not been recovered. Family members have said body parts were gathered into bags. Those facts are grim enough without turning them into a moral signal.
A crash that kills five people is first a technical failure and a human catastrophe. Treating the condition of the corpses as proof of purposeful judgement requires either a supernatural claim or an unproven allegation of sabotage. Mpofu offers neither. He simply moves from the horror of the scene to the satisfaction of a lesson.
The satisfaction is real for many. Chivayo lived loudly. He spent openly. He stood close to power. For citizens who watch the gap between the connected and the rest widen every year, his death felt like the universe finally keeping score.
Mpofu gave that feeling elegant language. He wrote that one may act with impunity, protected by the power and favour of mortals, but no-one escapes accountability forever. He warned against trampling the aspirations of the poor or mocking the suffering of the vulnerable.
Those sentences land because the grievances behind them are concrete. People have watched tenders awarded without competition, watched public money flow toward the same few names, and watched the same few names treat ordinary hardship as entertainment. When formal systems appear unable or unwilling to answer, people look for signs that consequence still exists somewhere.
Yet the leap from grievance to cosmic verdict does not help. It replaces the slow work of investigation with the quick pleasure of a story. Investigators have deployed forensic teams. Aviation experts are examining the aircraft. The cause of the crash is not yet public. Until those findings appear, the claim that the manner of death itself constitutes judgement remains speculation dressed as insight.
Speculation of this kind spreads easily because it feels complete. The body is ruined, therefore the life has been weighed and found wanting. That logic is tidy. It is also closed to evidence that might complicate the picture.
There is a further cost. Every time a polarising figure dies and large numbers of people respond with open satisfaction, the dead person’s full humanity shrinks. Chivayo had a wife who died with him. He had relatives who are still collecting remains and planning a burial without the usual viewing. Those details disappear once the death is converted into a public lesson.
The same conversion makes the next unpopular person easier to reduce. Mpofu’s question “So who’s next?” is not neutral. It invites the public to keep a running list. Lists of that kind do not stay confined to the deserving. They expand to whoever happens to stand in the wrong place when anger needs an outlet.
The Czech writer Václav Havel understood this danger. Writing under a system that specialised in turning lives into political symbols, he insisted that living in truth requires refusing both the regime’s myths and the comforting counter-myths that the opposition can invent.
He argued that the moment people prefer a satisfying narrative to the hard facts of a situation, they begin to reproduce the very habits they claim to oppose. The preference for cosmic justice over institutional justice is one such habit. It feels like resistance. In practice it leaves the machinery of power untouched while giving the public a temporary sense of balance.
Real accountability looks different. It looks like a transparent report on why the helicopter went down. It looks like public registers of assets and contracts that cannot be ignored. It looks like courts that can examine wealth and influence without fear of the consequences. It looks like political competition strong enough that no single network of friends can treat the state as private property.
None of those things requires a missing head or a body in a bag. They require citizens who keep demanding evidence even when a dramatic death offers emotional relief.
Mpofu is right that power should not grant permanent impunity. He is right that the poor are not a spectacle. He is right that many people feel a sense of closure at Chivayo’s end. Those observations do not require the additional claim that the crash itself was a form of judgement. That claim turns a tragedy into a sermon. Sermons can move crowds. They rarely build the systems that prevent the next tragedy from being necessary for people to feel that justice has occurred.
The healthier response is quieter and more demanding. Examine the crash without preconceived moral conclusions. Examine the networks of influence without waiting for plane crashes or sudden illnesses to do the work. Refuse the invitation to treat any citizen’s mutilated body as a public lesson.
The moment we accept that invitation, we stop asking the harder questions about how power is acquired, protected and constrained. We settle instead for the temporary comfort of believing that the universe has spoken.
The universe has not spoken. A helicopter fell out of the sky. The rest is still up to the living.