Zimbabwe COVID-19 Lockdown Monitoring Report 3 August 2020 – Day 125 – The Zimbabwean

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3.0       Highlights
President Emmerson Mnangagwa has appointed Air Commodore Jasper Chimedza as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health and Child Care.  He takes over from former substantive permanent secretary Dr Agness Mahomva who was appointed Chief Coordinator of the National Response to the Covid-19 pandemic in May this year.  Air Commodore Chimedza is a medical doctor who studied medicine and surgery at the University of Zimbabwe before being attested into the Air Force of Zimbabwe.The appointment of Dr Chimedza comes as striking doctors have vowed to press on with their job boycott despite pleas by President Emmerson Mnangagwa for them to return to work amid revelations that scores of people could be dying in their homes due to lack of medical care. President Mnangagwa pleaded with senior doctors to abandon the strike that began last week during an address at the burial of Agriculture minister Perrance Shiri at the heroes Acre on 31 July. The doctors joined nurses and other health workers, who have been on strike for over a month, as they demanded salaries in foreign currency and provision of personal protective equipment (PPE) to deal with COVID-19 cases.

The strike by the doctors has crippled the health delivery system during a time when the local COVID-19 transmissions have risen in the country, constituting more than 70 per cent of all cases. Bulawayo and Harare remain the worst affected provinces, followed by Matabeleland South and the Midlands provinces. More than 1 200 people have now been infected by COVID-19 in Harare, the new Zimbabwean epicentre, after the dramatic jump in confirmed infections this weekend. Zimbabwe now has 3 921 confirmed cases after its worst two days on record.

There are fears that the number of infected cases will increase as a result of the continued use of illegal entry points along the Limpopo River to access medical treatment and cheap basic commodities and drugs from South Africa by desperate Zimbabweans.  Most Zimbabweans who survived on cross border trading suffered a serious setback following the closure of borders in March, forcing many to illegally cross the borders to restock. Beitbridge East legislator Albert Nguluvhe (ZANU-PF) on Wednesday said most border jumpers were not Beitbridge residents, but came from as far as Chiredzi, Masvingo, Tsholotsho and other places to access cheap food and medication. He said the border jumpers were putting the nation at risk of contracting COVID-19.

Community leaders in Matobo have reacted to the influx of border jumpers from South Africa and Botswana in their areas by banning pregnant women and the elderly from attending funerals while consumption of food at such events is also no longer permitted as part of strategies adopted to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the area. The elderly and pregnant women, as well as people with underlying ailments, are more vulnerable to the deadly pandemic.

The Mashonaland Central Minister of State for Provincial Affairs who is also the chairperson of the Provincial COVID-19 Taskforce Honourable Monicah Mavhunga directed that all Taskforce meetings will now be virtual. This is in line with the Public Service Commission’s circular discouraging face to face meetings.

Midlands State University (MSU) has, due to the surge in COVID-19 cases in the country, suspended final year examinations that were set to start on 3 August. On July 24, Government gave a directive to all tertiary institutions to close and continue conducting lessons through e-learning as part of measures to curb the spread of COVID-19. The Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education permanent secretary Professor Fanuel Tagwira cited the surge in COVID-19 cases in the country as the main reason for the directive. This development has affected MSU final semester students in the faculties of Science and Technology, Law, Education and Natural Resources Management and Agriculture.

Essential service workers nationally using ZUPCO buses to report to work have expressed concern over delays at police checkpoints, where some of them have even been allegedly assaulted by soldiers despite producing valid clearance letters. The government last week tightened lockdown regulations following a spike in COVID-19 cases in the country, with police demanding exemption letters from those entering city centres. The essential service workers, most of them in the health sector, said they were being frustrated by police and soldiers at roadblocks. They said each route to the city centre had two to three roadblocks where passengers are made to disembark from the bus and be checked.

The Bulawayo City Health Department has instituted an investigation after claims that dozens of people who attended a lavish and wild birthday party thrown by a city socialite and businessman last month contracted COVID-19. Two people who reportedly attended the party have since died, the second being a close associate of the party organiser who died on Friday, reportedly from COVID-19 complications. The party, which was held on 4 July at a lodge in the affluent suburb of Burnside, has become the talk of the town with some reports alleging that most people who graced the event had contracted COVID-19 disease.

According to the Acting Health and Child Care Minister Professor Amon Murwira, hospitals should neither turn away patients nor demand a COVID-19 certificate before admitting patients, particularly in emergency cases. The exhortation comes after the country has gone through its worst month yet as 61 people succumbed to coronavirus in July alone. Infections rose by 2 564 cases during the same month, raising the spectre of more fatalities. The acting Minister said the Government was engaging hospitals to ensure they provided other life-saving services to avoid unnecessary loss of life.

6.0       Summary of violations
The table below summarises human rights violations documented by the Forum Secretariat and Forum Members from 30 March to 3 August 2020.

After arrest, Zimbabwean novelist decries state ‘chokehold’ – The Zimbabwean

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Dangarembga was bundled into a police truck as she demonstrated in the Harare suburb of Borrowdale [AFP]

Tsitsi Dangarembga, whose latest book “This Mournable Body” has been nominated for a Booker Prize, was bundled into a police truck while holding placards on Friday and charged with breaking the COVID-19 lockdown to hold an illegal gathering.

Bailed pending trial after a night in jail, the 61-year-old said she could not keep quiet while neglect and mismanagement left Zimbabweans unable to afford a decent meal and healthcare.

“These are things that are outside the reach of most Zimbabweans. It’s like the people of Zimbabwe are in a chokehold,” she told Reuters from her home in Harare’s affluent Borrowdale suburb.

“It’s a matter of survival really.”

Security forces deployed on Friday to block planned opposition protests over corruption and economic hardships. Foes say Mnangagwa is behaving like his autocratic predecessor Robert Mugabe and exploiting the coronavirus crisis as cover.

‘WHO IS PAYING YOU?’

Popular anger is high over inflation above 700%, hospital strikes, and shortages of medicines and foreign currency.

Mnangagwa blames the opposition, Western sanctions, droughts and the pandemic. “Dark forces both inside and outside have tampered with our growth and prosperity,” he said in a speech on Tuesday.

Dangarembga said she had been lucky after rights groups said some activists rounded up over Friday’s unrest were abducted and tortured. The government denies that.

“When we got into the (police) truck one of the first thing that happened is I was asked ‘who is paying you?’ I was very outraged by that question,” she recalled.

“What was going through my mind was:’what do we do now? The main thing is not to escalate the situation, we have not done anything wrong so we shouldn’t be frightened’.”

Dangarembga noted that a new hashtag #ZimbabweansLivesMatter was helping focus global attention.

“Trying to change Zimbabwe for the better is going to be a long engagement and we have to strategise,” she said.

Dangarembga’s first novel “Nervous Conditions” was part of Zimbabwe’s school curriculum and won the African section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989.

She also wrote “Neria”, Zimbabwe’s most successful film.

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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.