We are our brother’s keepers

IT is a fact that human rights violations occurring in Zimbabwe have been directly linked to political actors.

As the silly season of electoral campaigns will soon be reaching fever pitch, there is need for stakeholders to exercise vigilance and responsibility to avert the recurrence of the horrors of past polls.

Learning from past polls, politicians, especially from Zanu PF, should not resort to the abduction of pro-democracy activists, unfair arrest, police brutality and general intolerance to criticism of government policies as well as its performance.

On the other hand, citizens must keep their focus on safeguarding each other’s rights from being abused by speaking on behalf of each other’s rights. We are our brother’s keepers.

The government has a constitutional obligation to ensure that the sad episodes of 2018 in which human rights violations escalated are not repeated.

It would be a disservice to the people of Zimbabwe if the harmonised elections in 2023 are held without the authorities fully implementing the political and legal reforms stipulated by the Constitution.

For now, the government should be preoccupied with ensuring that our laws are aligned to the Constitution, especially electoral laws.

Media and security sector reforms should also be prioritised if we want to avoid what happened on August 1 2018 when soldiers killed innocent people with reckless abandon.

Zimbabwe has to honour its human rights obligations as affirmed by the United Nations’ working group on the Universal Periodic Review’s 142 recommendations regarding the state of human rights in Zimbabwe made in Geneva, Switzerland, in November 2016.

It is worrying that during the COVID-19-induced lockdowns, Zimbabwe witnessed developments that had the potential to exacerbate the country’s dire human rights situation.

Patriotic Zimbabwean