ZIM’S MIDNIGHT EXPRESS
Detainees in Harare’s remand prison claim they are subject to horrific conditions, including a lack of basic sanitation and food, as well as arbitrary beatings by prison guards
The metal doors sprang open and a voice barked orders in the poorly lit hall. “Everyone on his stomach! Everyone down!”
In just seconds, the 60 or so inmates in section C of Harare remand prison hit the ground, obeying a command they knew all too well. But for Parere Kunyenzura, newly arrived in the prison, it was all a bit confusing. As he tells the story, he dropped to the floor. Moments later, a prison warden began beating an inmate with his baton; others set on the remand prisoners with rubber whips.
“It became clear what was happening to us,” Kunyenzura tells the FM. “Everyone got a hiding, and I was not spared either.”
The Zimbabwe prisons & correctional services department did not respond to the FM’s requests for comment on this story. Neither did justice minister
Ziyambi Ziyambi.
Kunyenzura — a church bishop and leader of the opposition Zimbabwe Transformative Party (ZTP) — was arrested in Harare in July 2022 along with
34 of his congregants. He’d reportedly convened and led a procession of his congregants without notifying the police. On January 11, the 35 were found guilty of contravening the Maintenance of Peace & Order Act; each was served a threemonth suspended sentence and ordered to pay a Z$12,000 fine.
That, after Kunyenzura had already spent 187 days in the remand prison.
He says that “not a day went by without someone getting beaten up for no apparent reason. It was the order of the day.”
Other former inmates tell the FM of violence they either endured or witnessed at the hands of guards.
Kunyenzura’s ZTP deputy, Simon Goshomi, spent more than 100 days in remand, during which he says he saw — and suffered — similar violence.
He tells the FM of his experience on one particular day: when the cells opened for those attending court one morning, a few inmates left their cells at the same time to get porridge. “For that violation, everyone was physically assaulted in C section. We are talking of no less than 500 people being violently beaten for the sins of a few,” he says.
If Kunyenzura and Goshomi are to be believed, the conditions in Harare remand prison run counter to various provisions of the UN General Assembly’s resolution on the basic principles for the treatment of prisoners. Specifically, those around prisoners’ inherent dignity and value as human beings; the respect for their religious beliefs; and the retention of the rights and freedoms contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
They tell, for example, of a lack of food, basic sanitation and medication. That’s in addition to issues of overcrowding — and the arbitrary “justice” meted out by their guards.
For a start, there’s the indignity to which prisoners are subjected upon returning from court, according to Goshomi: strip-searches apparently recorded on CCTV.
“There are cameras in the strip-search area, and we don’t know who will be watching. It’s dehumanising,” he says.
The prison service is also struggling to fund the very basics such as food, Kunyenzura says, as the economy continues
its downward spiral and state institutions feel the pinch.
After a 6am breakfast of boiled corn starch, served as porridge, inmates line up in the kitchen to receive lunch at just 9.30am usually sadza (cooked maize meal) with boiled cabbage, says Kunyenzura. Dinner, served at 2.30pm, again consists of sadza, this time with boiled spinach or cabbage. On rare occasions, boiled beans are served.
For months, there was no cooking oil available in the kitchens. A delivery on September 23 ran out after just one month, Kunyenzura says.
“In the 187 days I was an inmate there, we only had tea six times and the bread was so dry we called it gwangwata [Shona slang for an extremely hard object]. It was stale and had mould,” says Kunyenzura. “It could have been 10-14 days old.”
The remand prison is also said to be grappling with a water crisis and inadequate sanitation. The inmates are locked in their cells for 15 hours a day, Kunyenzura claims from 3pm to 6am. With no functional toilets, they only have a bucket in which to relieve themselves. And that can only be emptied once the cells are opened in the morning.
Not helping matters is that water is sometimes unavailable at the facility. With a prison population of more than 2,000, just one day without water could threaten lives. It’s a ticking time bomb for cholera, Kunyenzura warns.
“If the clinic has no medication,” he adds, “it means you are bringing them [to prison] to kill them.” Of the two inmates who died during his time in remand, one didn’t receive the medical care he needed, Kunyenzura claims.
In his view, prison conditions are not fit for animals. Those blankets that are available in the cells “are torn and would have been left behind by other inmates”, he says. It’s no surprise the blankets are left behind, “given that they’re infested with lice”.
According to Goshomi, inmates’ freedom of religion is regularly violated too. “We were forced to attend ginya [compulsory] ministries,” he says. “There, people would be beaten while the preacher was in the middle of a sermon for not singing or participating enough.”
Not helping the stretched resources of prison authorities is the issue of overcrowding. At present, Zimbabwe’s prisons are at four times their capacity.
One of the central problems, it seems, is that Zimbabwe’s prison system simply cannot cope with the capital city’s burgeoning population and the resulting rise in inmate numbers. As at March
2021 the country’s prisons, with a holding capacity of 17,000 inmates, had a population of 22,000.
Today, a facility designed for 1,400 inmates is holding more than 2,000, a prison officer tells the FM, speaking on condition of anonymity.
It means that prisoners are piled so close together on the floor at night that they can smell each other’s breath, says Kunyenzura a surefire way to spread airborne diseases such as Covid.
But he believes there is a more sinister explanation for prisoners’ poor treatment, too. He contends this is the product of a system designed to harass and intimidate rivals real and imagined
of the ruling Zanu-PF. The party, he believes, uses the police and the “captured judicial system” to further these aims.
For journalist Hopewell Chin’ono, who was held in Chikurubi maximum security prison after his arrest in 2020, the prison system is a mirror of the general state of affairs in Zimbabwe. “For me, this is a reflection of the corruption in the government system,” he said on his release.
Says Musa Kika, a human rights lawyer and head of the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, such arrests are “an old, tested way to weed out individuals they [Zanu-PF] feel are a threat to them and also instil fear in the opposition”.
It is, he adds, “an obvious abuse of the criminal justice system and abuse of the constitution that provides for a right to a fair trial”.
He believes politically motivated arrests of opposition leaders in the country are nothing new. “It is a cycle that repeats itself every election year,” he says, referring to the national polls expected to be held in July or August. “Essentially, members of the opposition are always targeted with ... arbitrary arrests and pretrial detention as was seen in the case of Job Sikhala.”
Sikhala, activist lawyer and deputy chair of the opposition Citizens Coalition for Change, was arrested after allegedly threatening to avenge the death of murdered opposition activist Moreblessing Ali in June last year. He then spent more than 250 days in detention without trial.
“It appears inevitable that the onslaught on the opposition will intensify as elections approach,” political analyst Ibbo Mandaza told The Guardian newspaper in January, “not to mention the accompanying violence and bloodshed.”