Pressure mounts on lifting of booze ban
Pressure is mounting on the government to lift the ban on the sale of alcohol and to allow for more economic activity to prevent huge job losses. The DA-led Western Cape provincial government took a firm stance at the weekend, stating that domestic alcohol sales should be allowed immediately.
Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Monday issued a chilling threat to the opposition, labelling them hostile forces bent on undermining the country and its institutions.
Addressing the nation on Heroes’ Day, a public holiday set aside to commemorate those who fought in the country’s war of liberation, Mnangagwa said his government was not going to be cowed into surrendering to those forces.
“Today, we are holding our commemorations against the background of renewed, glaring and unjustified attacks by our perennial detractors both inside and outside our borders,” Mnangagwa said in a speech broadcast live on television.
The Zimbabwean government has grown increasingly hostile to its own people, brutally pinning down dissent and arresting those it perceives to be political threats. In the past few months, it has embarked on a crusade to kidnap, arrest and harass human rights activists and members of the opposition parties, the most notable being journalist Hopewell Chin’ono, opposition politician Jacob Ngarivhume and renowned author Tsitsi Dangarembga.
Others, such as MDC senior official Job Sikhala, are in hiding for fear of being imprisoned and tortured by the infamous Central Intelligence Organisation.
Mnangagwa described demands for him to uphold human, civil and political rights as “divisive falsehoods and concoctions by renegades and supremacists who want to pounce on our natural resources”.
He said that contrary to claims of brutality, his government had “since its inception three years ago accelerated the entrenchment and consolidation of constitutional democracy and the rule of law”.
Amid increasing pressure for him to intervene, President Cyril Ramaphosa recently appointed former speaker of parliament Baleka Mbete and former cabinet minister Sydney Mufamadi as special envoys to Zimbabwe and tasked them with “understanding the difficulties that the country is facing”.
Ramaphosa is the AU chair and his intervention could help cool down the political tensions.
Zimbabweans based in SA and some South Africans on Saturday picketed at the Zimbabwean embassy in Pretoria, where they clashed with police.
Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, which has over the years provided legal teams for victims of the government’s human rights abuses and is representing Ngarivhume and Chin’ono, on Sunday expressed concern about the pair’s treatment after they were transferred to a maximum security prison where the country’s most notorious prisoners are kept.
The lawyers said the transfer was done behind their backs and the two had been “stripsearched, shackled in leg irons and moved to Chikurubi Maximum Prison at night”.
As the government continues to put more resources into crushing dissent, very little has been available to fight the Covid19 pandemic, which is threatening to run out of control.
At the height of the recent surge in infections, Zimbabwe had no health minister. The funds set aside to purchase protective equipment were embezzled by corrupt officials, leading to the dismissal and arrest of the health minister, Obadiah Moyo, a close Mnangagwa ally.
This past week, Mnangagwa appointed his ailing deputy, retired general Constantino Chiwenga, to head the government’s fight against the virus.