Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition calls for the urgent intervention of SADC and African Union on the unfolding crisis in Zimbabwe – The Zimbabwean

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We particularly take note of the statements by the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU), and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) for taking the bold move in calling out President Mnangagwa and standing in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe at this hour of need and the clarion call for regional bodies like the SADC and the African Union to intervene.

The loud calls show that the Harare administration has been isolated and thus we reiterate our persistent calls to SADC and the African Union to urgently intervene and find a solution to the crisis in Zimbabwe.

As the Crisis Coalition, we urge SADC, the AU and the international community to urgently intervene and call for an all-inclusive national dialogue on Zimbabwe’s future.

We reaffirm that Zimbabwe’s dialogue process must involve all stakeholders. Relegating dialogue to political parties risks producing an elite pact that is in dissonance with the citizen’s interests.

We call upon Zimbabweans from across societal cleavages (political, religious, civic, business and labour) to engage in collective dialogue on the fundamental challenges facing the country and fashion a shared vision that moves the country towards democratization and away from the twin crises of poor governance and illegitimacy.

The dialogue must also involve a national visioning process that has civil society, government, political parties, business, religious groups and labour unions among other critical stakeholders.

The dialogue process should produce a clearly timed roadmap to the demilitarisation of civilian political processes and the restoration of normalcy by focusing on key political, economic and social reforms. In this regard, we call for FULL CONSULTATION of all stakeholders rather than cosmetic processes.

Creating a conducive environment that will allow stakeholders to freely share ideas on transitional alternatives is key in laying the foundations for meaningful dialogue. A conducive environment is a crucial confidence and trust-building step in the national dialogue. Coupled with the creation of an enabling environment, political actors must develop a culture that conforms to the Constitution and comply with rules of the “game” that creates an even playing field. Creating a conducive environment means that Zimbabwe must immediately undertake to:

  1. Immediately release all political prisoners, end torture, abductions and enforced disappearances, murder, rape and maiming civilians by the military, state security agents and vigilante groups
  2. Decriminalize the work of civic society and end the continued persecution and arbitrary arrests of civic society leaders and trade unionists and release political prisoners.
  3. Ensure that peace and human security prevail to allow all stakeholders to freely express their views on the national dialogue process
  4. Stop attempts at weakening the Constitution through amendments meant to further interests of individuals.
  5. Promote fair media coverage for all stakeholders and allow divergent views to be shared on all media platforms.

To achieve a peaceful and thriving democracy, it is important that civilian life and political processes be devoid of military interference. Demilitarising efforts must focus on the following:

  • Full implementation of the Spirit of the Constitution, with particular focus on Section 210.
  • Security personnel must be inducted and continuously trained in the fields of domestic and international human rights
  • The immediate and unconditional withdrawal of army personnel deployed in the streets of Zimbabwe.

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How artists have preserved the memory of Zimbabwe’s 1980s massacres – The Zimbabwean

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A scene from a play about the Gukurahundi genocide, 1983 The Dark Years, performed in Harare in 2018.
JEKESAI NJIKIZANA/AFP/Getty Images

Gibson Ncube, University of Zimbabwe

“Let people vent,” lamented performing artist and television personality Kudzai Sevenzo in a tweet as Zimbabweans on social media reacted to the death of Perence Shiri. Shiri was the Minister of Lands, Agriculture and Rural Resettlement.

Zenzele Ndebele, an investigative journalist, also spoke out in a tweet: “Shiri gets to be buried like a hero. We never got a chance to mourn our relatives who were killed by the 5th Brigade.”

Shiri was a military man who commandeered a praetorian army that killed over 20,000 civilians in the provinces of Matabeleland and the Midlands between 1983 and 1987. Gukurahundi saw his North Korean-trained unit, the Fifth Brigade, descend on provinces inhabited by the Ndebele people to quell dissent. Gukurahundi is a Shona term referring to the early summer rains that remove chaff and dirt from the fields.

The death of Shiri on 29 July 2020 has kindled flames of debate that the ruling party has tried to shut down for many years.

I argue, in a paper on Gukurahundi, that writers and artists have left behind a richly textured memory on what writer Novuyo Rosa Tshuma has called the country’s “original sin”.

Enforced ‘collective amnesia’

In the aftermath of Gukurahundi, former president Robert Mugabe enforced collective forgetting of this period in Zimbabwe’s history. He referred to it simply as a “moment of madness” and suggested that discussing the events would undermine attempts to nurture national unity.

His successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, Minister of State Security at the time of the Gukurahundi genocide, has also implored Zimbabweans to “let bygones be bygones”. At his 2017 inauguration he said that the past cannot be changed, but “there is a lot we can do in the present and the future to give our nation a different positive direction”.

However, as l contend in another paper, silence on Gukurahundi has not led to any national cohesion. Instead, it has been a part of what’s responsible for the culture of state violence and impunity in Zimbabwe since independence in 1980.

Writing against forgetting

Yet, a rich body of literary and visual artworks has emerged thematising the genocide. There have been books in indigenous languages such as Uyangisinda Lumhlaba (This world is unbearable) in Ndebele by Ezekiel Hleza and Mhandu Dzorusununguko (Enemies of independence) in Shona by Edward Masundire.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

There has been an even bigger corpus of texts written in English. Among them is the late Yvonne Vera’s 2002 novel The Stone Virgins. It details the horrors faced by villagers from a ruthless army. In Running with Mother, a 2012 novel by Christopher Mlalazi, a child narrator, Rudo, recounts the arrival of the Fifth Brigade in her village.

Peter Godwin’s largely autobiographical Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa
in 1996 gives a picture of Gukurahundi from the eyes of a young white journalist. And House of Stone, the 2018 novel by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, tells the story of an orphaned young man trying to explore his past. He’ll find out that his father is Black Jesus (a name by which Shiri was known). Tshuma’s descriptions of the genocide are detailed, graphic and ghastly.

Literary creativity has made it possible to remember, commemorate and document experiences that otherwise would have been forgotten or dispersed through wilful omission. In doing so, literary texts create narratives of Zimbabwe’s history and national identity.

W. W. Norton & Company

“To write is to banish silence,” writes Vera in her 1995 doctoral thesis on colonialism and narratives of resistance. “As a writer, you don’t want to suppress history, you want to be one of the people liberating stories.”

She explains that “to write is to engage possibilities for triumphant and repeated exits, inversion and recuperation of identity”. In this line of thinking, writing can offer victims of Gukurahundi a voice which the state continues to deny them.

Art of torture

Visual artworks have also engaged with Gukurahundi, such as in the exhibition Sibathontisele by Owen Maseko, which has stood for years as a material text-under-erasure in Zimbabwe. Sibathontisele is a Ndebele word meaning “we drip it on them”. It refers to an infamous torture technique used by the Fifth Brigade in which they dripped hot and melted plastic on victims.

Unlike literary texts, which have remained unbanned and uncensored, Maseko’s 2010 exhibition was banned by state security a day after its opening at the National Arts Gallery in Bulawayo and the artist was arrested. Visual art, it appears, is deemed more subversive than written texts. In spite of such restrictions, Maseko’s exhibition has been hosted outside Zimbabwe.

The artist explains in this article that art, justice and human rights are intricately interrelated. Visual art plays a role in bringing to the surface narratives on Gukurahundi, which have been buried for almost three decades.

The rich memory

Writers and visual artists are able to create alternative spaces for marginalised and forgotten stories. And Zimbabwe’s artists have created a rich memory and archive that counters the culture of forgetting and criminalising open discussion of Gukurahundi.

Through their works, histories are revisited so that they can be better understood and can be accorded their rightful recognition. They have opened new spaces of discussion and have gestured towards the importance of remembering and learning from the past.The Conversation

Gibson Ncube, Associate Professor, University of Zimbabwe

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Zimbabwe’s president names his deputy as new health minister – The Zimbabwean

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Retired army chief Constantino Chiwenga

Chiwenga replaces Obaddiah Moyo who was removed from the post last month after allegations of corruption.

In his new role, Chiwenga will be required to “stabilise, restructure and reform” the national healthcare system, the government said in a statement.

The main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)immediately criticised the appointment, saying Chiwenga was not the right man for the job in a time of the coronavirus pandemic.

Zimbabwe has recorded more than 4,000 COVID-19 cases and 80 deaths and health officials say infections will continue to rise for sometime.

The MDC said in appointing Chiwenga, Mnangagwa had shown a “gross display of incompetence.”

Chiwenga spent four months in China receiving medical treatment for an unknown illness until November last year. He has returned three times since then for medical check-ups, according to government officials. (Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe Editing by Promit Mukherjee and Tom Brown)

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Zimbabwe president vows to ‘flush out’ critics in clampdown – The Zimbabwean

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Zimbabwean president Emmerson Mnangagwa said the restrictions would remain in place indefinitely because the country needed to ease strategically out of its lockdown. Photograph: EPA/Aaron Ufumeli

President Emmerson Mnangagwa described critics as “dark forces,” and “a few bad apples” that should be “overcome,” in an address on state television Tuesday.

The arrests started last week when the military and police thwarted an anti-government protest and Mnangagwa indicated that they will continue.

“We will overcome attempts at the destabilization of our society by a few rogue Zimbabweans acting in league with foreign detractors,” he said, warning that “bad apples who have attempted to divide our people and to weaken our systems will be flushed out. … Enough is enough.”

Mnangagwa made the speech as local and international pressure mounted on his administration over the allegations of human rights abuses.

The hashtag #Zimbabweanlivesmatter has been used in social media to draw attention to the wave of arrests.

Security agents deployed in the capital, Harare, and other major cities last week to foil the protest planned for Friday, resulting in empty streets that day. Some people who tweeted in support of the demonstrations or tried to hold low key protests were arrested, and some were assaulted and tortured, according to human rights groups and Tendai Biti, spokesman for the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change Alliance.

Investigative journalist Hopewell Chin’ono has been in jail for two weeks after he posted on social media in support of the anti-government demonstration and made a series of allegations of government corruption. Chin’ono awaits a bail hearing this week on charges of allegedly encouraging violence.

Opposition leader Nelson Chamisa visited Chin’ono in prison Tuesday.

“Clearly we must do something about what is happening. … It is time that we take care of Zimbabwean lives that matter … We must be serious about the situation,” said Chamisa, leader of the MDC Alliance, after visiting Chin’ono and Jacob Ngarivhume, an official of the opposition party who had helped to organize the foiled protests, who is also jailed.

“They are in high spirits and they really want to see a better country,” said Chamisa of the two jailed men.

Other arrests include internationally known author Tsitsi Dangarambga who was held in police cells overnight last week after staging a small protest. Journalist Mduduzi Mathuthu and several members of the MDC Alliance are in hiding.

In his speech, Mnangagwa, who rights groups accuse of using COVID-19 as a cover to clamp down on dissent, said Zimbabwe’s security forces would not relent.

“Security services will carry out their duties with appropriate astuteness and resolve. The protection of the right to life is paramount, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and machinations by the destructive terrorist opposition groupings,” he said.

Mnangagwa pledged to fight corruption and fix the collapsing economy, whose poor performance he blamed on “divisive politics of some opposition elements, illegal economic sanctions, cyclones, droughts and more recently the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.”

Tensions are rising in the southern African country as the economy implodes. Inflation is more than 700%, the second-highest in the world, while the World Food Program has projected that 60% of the population could be food insecure by the end of the year.

The pandemic has brought a new layer of suffering. In public hospitals, doctors and nurses are frequently on strike and infrastructure is so dilapidated that “unborn children and mothers are dying daily,” according to the Zimbabwe Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

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Biglaw Attorney ‘Helps’ Kanye West — See Also

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If You Needed More Evidence About The Role Of Race In The Death Penalty, Here You Go

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(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

According to a study published in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, how much more likely is a convicted murderer to get the death penalty if the victim is white compared to if the victim is black?

Hint: The study looked at Georgia death sentence data studied by University of Iowa law professor David Baldus as well as statistics on actual executions carried out.

See the answer on the next page.

Who’s The Cuck Now, Donald?

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Employee Wellness Surcharge Lawsuit Dismissed; 52 Cent Charge Adequately Disclosed, Not Material

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Last December, I covered a lawsuit which alleged that Blue Plate Restaurant Co. in the Twin Cities engaged in consumer fraud and other malfeasance by charging customers a three percent “employee wellness surcharge.” That lawsuit has since been dismissed, and I spoke with the lawyers on both sides of it to provide an update on where things stand.

Joe Windler of Winthrop & Weinstine represented Blue Plate in the matter. Windler represents a number of bars, restaurants, and local breweries (heroic practice area, if you ask me) in addition to Blue Plate, and was obviously pleased to see his motion to dismiss granted.

According to Windler, this case wasn’t really about the Consumer Fraud Act, which he fully supports as an appropriate piece of legislation in the right contexts. Rather, Windler saw this as an important case for restaurants that operate on very thin margins to begin with, especially those in municipalities with requirements to provide employees with healthcare, sick leave, etc., so as to have the option to include small and adequately disclosed wellness surcharges on diners’ tabs.

Indeed, the plaintiff, Christopher Ashbach, only paid an additional 52 cents for the employee wellness surcharge on the order which served as the basis for the suit: a half-dozen oysters and a cup of coffee. In its own order, on the motion to dismiss, the district court found that the restaurant’s physical menu, the website, and the bill all disclosed and explained the employee wellness charge. Furthermore, the district court determined that Ashbach failed to show that the 52 cent charge was material to his own decision-making process when he asked for oysters and coffee (perhaps he was a victim of his own generosity; having left a pretty nice tip of $4.72 on a total tab of $19.28, it’s a little hard to argue that 52 cents really mattered all that much to you).

“I can’t emphasize enough how highly I think of my client,” Windler said. “I think the absolute world of Blue Plate as a company, and I think the world of the owners. This is a great client, a great employer, and I’m just grateful we were able to show the Court in relatively short order how meritless the claims were here.”

Windler is happy that his client can now move on and work on surviving through COVID-19. Since the order on the motion to dismiss, there has been a stipulation of dismissal with prejudice, so it doesn’t look like we have any appellate review to look forward to. Windler added that now is a good time to rally and support local bars, restaurants, tap rooms, and breweries, to the extent we can all do so safely and responsibly (I’m way ahead of him on that).

Jon Farnsworth of Spencer Fane was representing Ashbach, and he had a different perspective.

“Myself and my client are very supportive of making sure that cooks and waitstaff are healthy, this case was never about that,” Farnsworth said. “This case was about being sneaky, trying to bury things in small print. We’d be completely willing to pay extra knowing it was going to waitstaff, but this was a matter of not knowing what the charge was, one, and two, not knowing where the money was actually going.”

Farnsworth thinks there should be more overt disclosures about these types of surcharges, or more simply, that the best practice would be to just adjust menu prices. While he disagrees with aspects of the district court’s order to dismiss, he says at the end of the day his client is happy with the result in that there has been press around the issue to provide greater exposure to the fact that bars and restaurants are increasingly tacking on employee wellness surcharges to customers’ bills. If it’s any consolation, when I wrote about this suit in December (making light of it, mostly), I received a LOT more hate mail than usual from people who were also not big fans of employee wellness surcharges.

Both Windler and Farnsworth have my thanks for taking the time to offer me their perspectives on this case. I guess if you’re somewhere where the restaurants are open, the takeaway here is to strap on a facemask and go dine, but be sure to take a keen look at the menu beforehand if you don’t want to risk paying an employee wellness surcharge.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.