The Crocodile’s soft genocide
Political violence and repression are nothing new in Zimbabwe, but for most citizens life is now worse than it ever was under Robert Mugabe. Christina Lamb reports.
For Jasmine Toffa, the hardest moment of her life was not being beaten black and blue by regime thugs. It came when the Zimbabwean MP appeared in parliament after surgery, broken hands in plaster, and the justice minister laughed at her.
The single mother of three had gone to campaign for a fellow opposition member in council by-elections 110km from her constituency in the city of Bulawayo. She was in his house when people came running to warn them that hoodlums from the ruling party were assaulting anyone wearing opposition yellow.
‘‘They forced their way in, pulled me out and started beating me with sticks and branches. I held my hands up to protect my face.
‘‘They knew I was an MP. They kept saying ‘honourable’ as they beat me. ‘Honourable, why are you here? Honourable, are you sure you support [the opposition leader] Nelson Chamisa?’ ’’
Political violence and repression are nothing new in Zimbabwe, where Zanu-PF has been in power since independence in 1980. But with fresh elections due in July, the ‘‘softening up’’ of voters has begun earlier this time and is unfolding in more sinister ways, leading many to fear this poll will be the bloodiest yet.
‘‘It’s going to be a massacre if the international community does not intervene,’’ warned Peter Mutasa, head of Crisis in Zimbabwe, a coalition of churches and human rights groups.
When Robert Mugabe was ousted in November 2017, people danced in the streets and there was hope of a new dawn. His successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, 80, donned a colourful knitted scarf, flew to Davos and declared the country ‘‘open for business’’. The British ambassador at the time praised the new president, Mugabe’s long-time right-hand man, as ‘‘a pragmatist’’.
On the surface, Zimbabwe remains a beautiful country. This year tens of thousands of tourists will marvel at the Victoria Falls, see elephants and rhinos in its national parks and watch hippos wallow on the Zambezi.
But for most Zimbabweans, life is worse than ever. For Mnangagwa, known as ‘‘the
Crocodile’’, has quashed dissent more brutally than ever and presided over a collapse in living standards while his cronies have prospered. ‘‘We’ve jumped from the frying pan into the fire,’’ says Chamisa, the opposition leader, when we meet in a secret location. He has survived two assassination attempts. ‘‘Mnangagwa is doing what Mugabe did, with a lot more malevolence and maliciousness.’’ Zimbabwe was once a model for the continent, the breadbasket of Africa. Today, much of its population is on the verge of starvation. Inflation at 244% and the interest rate at 200% are the highest in the world. Three-quarters of people are unemployed and corruption has devastated state resources. Restrictions on the media mean this article had to be reported undercover.
Nothing works. Daily power cuts last for 20 hours, forcing people to use candles and cook on fires. The vast majority lack access to clean water. Oncepristine highways look like war zones, studded with potholes. Ask to buy a ticket at Bulawayo station and Loveless, the woman in the ticket booth, falls about laughing. ‘‘We haven’t had passenger trains for more than three years,’’ she says.
‘‘Mnangagwa has taken us back to the dark ages,’’ says Tendai Biti, the former finance minister. ‘‘This is soft genocide.’’
Most of the population survives by selling to each other on the roadside, turning cities such as Harare into vast street markets. Prices are in US dollars. The real-time gross settlement dollar, known as the Zim dollar, currently sells at an unofficial rate of about 1100 Zim dollars to one US dollar. The American notes in circulation are so worn there is an industry in gluing them together. Those who can, escape. A third of the population – five million – have fled overseas, a larger exodus than from war zones in Syria and Ukraine.
At Parirenyatwa Hospital, among the best in Africa 20 years ago, they have run out of intravenous paracetamol and patients must provide their own dressings and sutures.
‘‘We used to do everything – heart transplants, complex microsurgery,’’ says one surgeon, speaking anonymously.
‘‘Now it’s just basic emergency procedures. The last time we did elective surgery was in June last year. We have a CT scan but no radiologist, so no-one to read them. We have lost so many staff we have just two theatre nurses instead of 13. Most have gone to the UK, where they can earn 10 times as much.’’
Education is in a similar plight. A Unicef report last year found that almost half of children were out of school, unable to pay fees. Teenage pregnancy is rife. Drugs such as crystal meth are ubiquitous, with sale locations marked by pairs of shoes hanging from lampposts.
In Magamba settlement in Hatcliffe Extension, a shanty town of plastic and cardboard shelters in a muddy vale in northern Harare, I meet Prisca, 36, carrying a bucket of mangoes and tomatoes she has been trying to sell.
She has four children aged
4 to 13, bringing them up alone after her husband died of ‘‘bad beer’’. ‘‘None are at school as there is no way I can pay,’’ she says. She earns between $1 and $3 a day selling fruit and veg, which she buys once a week on a three-hour bus ride and sells for a small markup.
Yet only a few miles away is Borrowdale Brooke, a gated community where the streets are lined with mansions. Peacocks strut on the lawns between Greek-style statues and fountains; Rolls-Royces and Bentleys sit in the drives. Power cuts and water shortages do not trouble its residents: They have their own solar power and boreholes.
Nearby is the so-called Oligarch Road, dotted with highwalled properties with helipads and security cameras and inhabited by friends of Mnangagwa’s family, who have become rich on mining, fuel, foreign exchange and government infrastructure contracts.
Chief among them is Kudakwashe Tagwirei, a tycoon known as the Queen Bee, who is under United States sanctions along with his wife, Sandra Mpunga. A US Treasury report accuses him of benefiting from his connections to Mnangagwa and giving expensive cars to officials in return.
The EU and UK have travel bans and asset freezes on multiple Zimbabwean individuals, including all four security chiefs. Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth in 2002 for its violent seizure of white-owned farms and human rights abuses.
Mnangagwa has been lobbying to be allowed back, yet Mugabe’s former security chief, responsible for some of the worst excesses of the old regime, has proved even more vicious in power – and wilier.
‘‘He has tried to capture every institution, but what is unique is he also tried to capture the opposition,’’ says Chamisa, 44, the opposition leader.
In 2018, Chamisa narrowly lost the presidential election to Mnangagwa in a contest he claimed was rigged. Two years later, a member of a rival faction within his opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), went to court to claim to be its true leader. He won and troops stormed the MDC’s offices to prevent Chamisa returning. The ruling party later rewarded the MP with a farm and ministry.
Chamisa was forced to create an entirely new party, the Citizens Coalition for Change, known as Triple-C, and draws hope from rumours of splits in the ruling party and from recent elections in Zambia, Lesotho, Kenya and Malawi that saw incumbents ousted.
Last year Triple-C won 19 of 28 by-elections and 75 of 122 council elections. ‘‘That’s not Mickey Mouse,’’ says Chamisa. ‘‘That’s big, that’s why they are panicking. Change is in the air. People know this election is a matter of life and death. But we need to win big so they can’t manipulate the results.’’
Mnangagwa spoke of the elections in his new year address. ‘‘I urge each of us to continue being peace-loving and politically mature citizens,’’ he said.
Within days, a group of elderly people, some as old as 79, were beaten in Murehwa, 80km east of Harare, for attending an opposition meeting. A chilling video was released as a warning.
The cabinet recently agreed a so-called Patriotic Act to punish people who criticise the country while abroad or who call for sanctions.
Several opposition MPs are in prison. One, Job Sikhala, has been in a maximum-security jail for more than seven months with no trial after speaking at the funeral of activist Moreblessing Ali, a 46-year-old mother of two whose remains were found in a well in June.
Those opposition MPs or officials who are not in jail are almost all on bail for nebulous charges, forced to waste time appearing in court or police stations and unable to travel as their passports are impounded. ‘‘They have completely weaponised the law,’’ says Fadzayi Mahere, a lawyer and Triple-C spokeswoman, who is one of those on bail.
Two weeks ago, two Triple-C MPs were arrested along with 24 supporters for holding a private meeting. When their lawyer, Kudzai Kadzere, went to the police station, he was ambushed by riot police and beaten so badly his right hand was broken. When he went back after surgery to file a report, he was charged with ‘‘causing criminal nuisance’’.
‘‘People have been messaging me, warning ‘They will kill you. Stop’,’’ he said. ‘‘But that’s what they want. They are trying to tie up the whole civil society in cases.’’
Many people believe there is no point in voting because the election will be rigged and the risk of supporting the opposition is too high. General Constantine Chiwenga, the army chief turned vice-president, told a rally last year they would ‘‘crush the opposition like lice’’.
Tears pour down the face of Toffa as she recalls the attack in October that left her with broken hands. ‘‘They whacked my calves and ankles,’’ the MP says. ‘‘It was like a documentary I’d seen on genocide in Rwanda. I am 58 but I was so terrified I cried out, ‘Mummy!’ ’’
Finally the assailants left and the battered survivors stumbled into the bush, where they hid for hours in a dry riverbed. When Toffa finally got to a clinic in Bulawayo, she was bruised and swollen. Both hands were fractured, the left one so shattered she needed surgery to insert a metal plate. Her sons, who live overseas, begged her to give up politics.
Instead, she went to Parliament. ‘‘The home affairs minister had said it was ‘all a facade, the opposition was famous for making up stories’, so I went there and held up my hands in plaster, but he and the justice minister were laughing at me,’’ she says.
‘‘If I’m being treated like this as a sitting MP, beaten in broad daylight then ridiculed on national TV, what hope have the voiceless?’’
Yet the international community has also remained silent, fatigued, it seems, by the decades of repression and misrule. ‘‘We need the world’s eye on us,’’ pleads Chamisa. ‘‘It may seem people are free but they are not. They are scared. When history is written, Zimbabwe will be in The Guinness Book of Records for being the biggest jail on Earth.’’
What hope is there for the opposition under such conditions? Toffa falls silent, then sighs. ‘‘We can dream of miracles,’’ she says.