HARARE – Vice President Constantino Chiwenga made his first public appearance on Tuesday after undergoing treatment in South Africa for an undisclosed ailment.

In state media pictures of the 63-year-old attending a Cabinet meeting in Harare, he appeared pale.

Chiwenga returned home on Monday night after Zimbabweans staged a protest in front of a Cape Town Hospital where he is reported to have undergone treatment demanding that he be deported.

Some 39 years after independence from Britain, Zimbabwean leaders and government officials get treated in foreign hospitals with no incentive to fix the local health care system.

The former army general was taken ill last Wednesday shortly after a meeting of the Zanu PF politburo in Harare. He was treated at the Avenues Clinic and released after three hours.

Doctors appear to have been sufficiently concerned by his condition later in the week and a private jet was scrambled which flew him to Cape Town.

He missed a Zanu PF rally in Mt Darwin on Saturday. Medical sources at the Groote Schuur Hospital told ZimLive they had seen Chiwenga in a corridor at the facility in the company of Health Minister Dr John Mangwiro, although hospital officials on Monday denied he had been an “inpatient” there.

The Zimbabwe government is notoriously secretive about the health of President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his two deputies, Chiwenga and Kembo Mohadi. When Chiwenga spent weeks at a hospital in Pretoria last October, as revealed by ZimLive, the government remained tight-lipped until he had sufficiently recovered to return home. Presidential spokesman George Charamba said at the time that Chiwenga was fatigued and had been treated for war-time injuries from the 1970s bush war for independence.

Chiwenga, who has appeared in public with bandage-patched swollen hands, returned home with strict doctors’ orders to take time away from work, but he was back in office within days.

Mohadi, who is also unwell, is a regular in South African hospitals. Mnangagwa, who made a pre-election pledge to give Zimbabweans “affordable and quality healthcare” is also treated in South Africa.