The Cost of Mediocrity

There is a lot of public interest around the termination of Energy Mutodi’s appointment as Deputy Minister for Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services.

Source: The Cost of Mediocrity – The Zimbabwean

Energy Mutodi is a trained High School Teacher who has also ventured into music, real estate, and politics.

No doubt he is a versatile enterprising character, and it is unfair to take away his drive for personal development. He has got a number of degrees reported to be in his name, including an academic doctorate that he happily flaunts around with a trademark social media profile picture of him donning a PhD cap and gown.

Mutodi’s music career was more of a funded project that depended on massive promotion of well packaged mediocrity than talent and substance.

His venture into real estate left a legacy of conning, embezzlement, broken promises, legal battles, undelivered results, public anguish, mass betrayal, and lost investments.

There is next to nothing to show for the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions that people invested into Mutodi’s housing project, only to be told endless stories of why the promised land or houses were taking forever to be delivered, something that did not materialise in the end.

Little is known about his teaching career, but his subsequent conduct and character in the public domain do not read like that of someone that could be trusted with moulding future lives of children.

So how did someone like this end up a whole Deputy Minister? His mediocrity is a matter definition than opinion, and it is written all over his face, voice and character. He openly carries himself like an annoying idiot, and there is no second-guessing about that. A two-minute visit to his Twitter account is all that is needed to substantiate the assertion above.

Patronage rewards and it rewards handsomely sometimes. This is why Mutodi looked at our political system and realised that all he needed was to align himself with ruling political elites, arm himself with an aura of intellectualism; contrived, acquired, or earned; whichever was quicker and achievable.

So he went into his scandalous housing project fully knowing that he just needed an exit plan after collecting people’s hard-earned money in the pretext that his project would deliver cheap homes to people. Of course, the exit plan for all such people like Mutodi is impunity deriving from corrupt political connections connecting right to top echelons of power.

In short, he joined the notorious cartel of land barons that have ripped off Zimbabweans in recent years; coming clothed in ZANU-PF robes. They are many, and only those that went astray with political correctness have been punished- albeit politically and never judicially. They can’t be taken to jail or to court for fear of exposing the worst in the system.

This is the only reason Energy Mutodi was serving as a Deputy Minister, not a long term prisoner.

So the President saw it fit to politically reward Mutodi for his appreciated runner role against G40 machinations when factionalism was at its peak in Zanu-PF.

He did a lot to send coded messages about ED’s hidden presidential ambitions at the time, including the famed picture where he and ED posed with a mug marked “I am the Boss.”

That did not only sent shockwaves into the opposite camp but also got Jonathan Moyo to look for Sydney Sekeramayi as a counter decoy to try and neutralise ED’s influence within ZANU-PF.

Certainly, no one bothered to orient Mutodi on policy regarding Information, Publicity or Broadcasting. There is a lady Minister there doing a fairly decent job overseeing the sector, and Mutodi was deployed there as a do-nothing deputy, only there to enjoy the perks.

Idleness and mediocrity are a bad combination. They created a nonsense-tweeting idiot out of the evidently energetic Energy Mutodi, and the man became a Grade A Nuisance on social media, annoying friends, foes and neutrals in equal measure.

He was a burdensomely unhelpful comrade to the Vakarashi Brigade and a provocative idiot to the opposition.

The cost of rewarding mediocrity is what Mutodi’s has taught us as a nation.

What was such a man doing in the top 100 politicians governing our country? He does not even deserve to govern himself, all respect being accorded to him, and to whoever appointed him.

Now that he has been relieved of his duties in government, can the appointing authority begin to look at merit before loyalty, merit before factional affiliation, merit before patronage, and of course merit before ethnicity and tribe?

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!