Spare a thought for those in prison

THE evening when I walked into Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison as part of my punishment by Emmerson Mnangagwa’s regime for exposing the looting of COVID-19 public funds, I was met by a nurse who was honest and straight with me.

“....we don’t even have paracetamol tablets in this prison,” she said to both Jacob Ngarivhume and myself after I had asked about the drug situation at the prison.

I knew then that I was entering a horror prison which was not able to take care of our basic health needs, or any unforeseen medical eventualities.

The very least that a prison could have done was to have basic medicines, but not at Chikurubi.

These are the nightmares that not only Zimbabweans at home encounter in Zimbabwe’s public hospitals, but even prisoners in Zimbabwe’s most feared prison, Chikurubi, and across the prison service.

Two nights later after my arrival around 2am, I heard so much noise coming from an adjacent prison cell, there was wailing and banging of the prison cell wire-metal gate.

Prisoners were pleading for prison officers to come immediately as one of the prison inmates was seriously ill.

Thirty minutes later, I heard prison officers coming up the stairs accompanied by hospital staff, the sick prisoner not given anything, because there was nothing to give. Welcome to Chikurubi!

Prisoners are dying at Chikurubi, while out here government is not showing any urgency to address the health delivery crisis in the country and at prisons. The top officials don’t care, and they lie about it too.

I regularly saw sick prisoners lying on the ground in pain with no medical assistance, not because the nurses were unwilling to help, but because they had nothing to help the sick prioners with.

I was terrified of COVID-19 after realising that the prison had such a broken down and dysfunctional health delivery facility, one that was just there in name and not in practice.

My personal physician, Dr Nyasha Maboreke, came to see me three or four times during my time of persecution.

He was shocked that the prison could not even give him a high blood pressure ( HBP) machine so that he could check my BP levels.

This machine costs US$5 online for a basic one, yet the biggest prison in Zimbabwe, where directors are driving latest Toyota Land Cruisers and expensive twin-cabs, does not have one in its prison hospital.

The number of prisoners testing positive to COVID-19 were going up while I was at Chikurubi, yet those who tested positive were simply isolated for six days and given warm water as a medical remedy, nothing more.

I asked one of the friendly nurses why this was the case, “... inga you always write about it wani nhai Hopewell,” she said with a wry smile.

“Looting, huori ndowauraya hurumende (corruption has killed our country),” she said emphatically, then moved away as she raised her hands into the air as a sign of giving up.

In Ngarivhume’s prison cell section alone, six prisoners tested positive to the deadly virus in one day.

The thought of getting sick at Chikurubi is scary for the prisoners and should be scarier for anyone with a relative inside that prison.

The prison hospital is a dysfunctional facility without the required basic medicines, or just human dignity expected of any such medical facility looking after 2 600 men and women.

A mental health patient was killed by another mental health prisoner while the other prisoners watched in fear in the mental health section of the prison in August.

“What happened?” I asked one of the friendly and thoughtful prison officers.

“There was no medication to give the ‘killer’ prisoner, so he simply acted out his paranoia and killed his fellow inmate while everyone else watched,” the prison officer said to me with a sad expression on his face.

There are mentally ill prisoners who have been waiting for assessment, and yet it hasn’t been done for years because the assessment board that sits to assess these prisoners hasn’t sat for over two years, according to a social worker I spoke to at the prison.

The social worker told me that some of the mentally ill prisoners spend years in the prison facility for a crime as small as stealing a loaf of bread or insulting someone.

All this suffering for these mentally ill prisoners simply because of a failure to convene the mental health board to assess the prisoners.

The prisoners’ deaths are unceremonious and degrading, but life goes on without the outside world knowing about this tragic reality inside Chikurubi.

The State tragically relies on propaganda, lying about the situation inside the prison, and I saw this firsthand!

When I was at Chikurubi, almost all prisoners didn’t have COVID-19 masks, no soap to wash their hands, no running water in their cells where they spent 17 hours locked up each day.

When Ngarivhume, St Mary’s MP Job Sikhala and I made noise about the issue of masks, the prison officials knew that our noises would soon be making their way into our court arguments.

They brought a ZBC camera, wheeled out a group of about 20 prisoners who were made to sing while wearing masks in front of the ZBC camera, and the story that evening on ZBC was that all prisoners at Chikurubi had masks.

The truth is that almost all prisoners at Chikurubi didn’t have masks right up to the day I left prison on September 2.

The prison doctor even participated in this deceitful charade to hoodwink the nation into believing that every prisoner had a mask, when almost all of them didn’t have one.

“You should all make sure that you don’t remove your masks,” said Dr Evidence Gaka in front of the camera knowing very well that there were no masks to be removed.

When the prisoners tried to protest through questions in front of the camera, Dr Gaka, who is also the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Services medical doctor, was gone.

The failure to provide masks is a direct result of the looting of public funds meant for COVID-19 consumables that I had reported about in May, June and July this year.

I was arrested and abused as punishment for making these corruption exposures, although the State comically charged me with incitement of public violence.

Four days before I was finally given bail by High Court judge Justice Tawanda Chitapi, I requested through my legal team for my personal doctor to come and see me.

I was feeling extremely unwell and I was not eating. I had a terrible fever, weak joints, a mild headache and a lack of appetite. It was a Sunday afternoon when Dr Maboreke came to see me on August 30. He did physical tests and said that I was exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms, so he did two COVID-19 tests.

He wrote a letter to the prison officials asking them to make sure that I didn’t go to court for my routine remand on Tuesday, until my COVID-19 test results were back. He told the prison boss that this was very important because if I was COVID-19 positive, I could spread the virus in the truck that takes us to court, and also in court.

We were packed like sardines in that green truck, there was no social distancing as required by World Health Organisation regulations, which were adopted by Zimbabwe.

Breathing alone was difficult, we would be sweating due to the lack of proper ventilation, and by the time we got to the next destination, prisoners would be drenched in sweat.

The next day on Monday, my fellow cellmate, Sikhala and some sympathetic prison officers told the media that I was unwell.

The news spread quickly online; the prison service chose to ignore Dr Maboreke’s medical instructions and advice to score cheap propaganda points.

They wanted to tell the world that I was well as opposed to what had been correctly reported in the media both home and abroad that I was ill.

The State propaganda newspaper, The Herald, ran an article titled Chin’ono not seriously ill, says ZPCS. See https:// www.herald.co.zw/chinono-not-seriously

The prison hospital could not help to give me at all, no medication, not even a paracetamol tablet.

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