A seven-member Zimbabwean parliamentary delegation is in Kigali, Rwanda on a week-long study visit on the operations of the Rwandese One-Stop Shop model which the country is adopting through the envisaged Zimbabwe Investment and Development Agency (ZIDA) state media has reported.

The delegation, which comprises members of the joint Portfolio Committees on Foreign Affairs and International Trade and that of Industry and Commerce, is led by Kindness Paradza, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Portfolio Committee.

The visit to learn from Rwanda comes at a time when the world is begining to realise dents in the Paul Kagame administration which was for sometime believed to be a champion in Africa after a perceived pleasant turn around from a genocide era.

Several members of political groups opposed to President Paul Kagame have gone missing in recent years and never been accounted for after that with most democracies now beginning to trend extremely cautious with the country.

We highlight below a few of the high profile disappearances that Rwandan opposition politicians and activists handed been subjected to which maybe the Zimbabwe foreign affairs office may have ignored but the world is talking about.

Just last week, when Eugene Ndereyimana left home, he didn’t tell his wife where he was going, and she didn’t ask. The less she knew, the better, she thought.

The 29-year-old father of two was traveling from his home in Rwanda’s southeastern Ngoma district to the northeastern town of Nyagatare for a political meeting on July 15.

But the people waiting for Ndereyimana to arrive lost contact with him when he was just five kilometers (3.1 miles) from the venue.

He hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

Ndereyimana is a representative for the FDU-Inkingi, an unregistered coalition of opposition parties against President Paul Kagame, who has been in power since 2000. He is one of at least five FDU members who have gone missing under mysterious circumstances over the last few years in Kagame’s Rwanda.

Opposition politicians and supporting party members say they face intimidation, violence, jail time or the prospect of disappearing for opposing the President and his ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

For Ndereyimana, that intimidation began last September, when he was arbitrarily detained by military officers at a local police station, his wife Joseline Mwiseneza

“For them he was an enemy,” Mwiseneza said, referring to the local authorities.

She added that Ndereyimana’s political activities created difficulties in his everyday life — from harassment by security forces to the inability to get credit from the local bank.

Now, Mwiseneza says she doesn’t know what to say to their children, who keep on asking where their father is, and fears for her husband’s life. As she waits for answers, others politically aligned with her husband have met violent ends.

In a harrowing case in March, 30 year old Anselme Mutuyimana a close aide to FDU president Victoire Ingabire, was found dead in a forest in the country’s northwest region. Residents who found Mutuyimana said he appeared to have died by strangulation, according to the party.

In another incident last October, jailed FDU Vice President Boniface Twagirimana went missing from a high security prison.

Twagirimana and eight other FDU party members were serving out a sentence following an arrest in 2017 on charges of forming an armed group and seeking to overthrow the government, charges Twagirimana denied. When he went missing, Rwanda’s correctional service said he escaped from prison.

In May 2017, party member Jean Damascene Habarugira disappeared after he was called to meet an official responsible for the security of his locality. Three days later, Habarugira’s family were called to collect his body from a local hospital.

In a statement, the FDU said that Habarugira was “assassinated in cold blood” because of his opposition to the local authority’s agricultural policies and concerns over police brutality.

FDU head Ingabire says that she believes that these events, including the most recent disappearance of Ndereyimana, are a signal that the government isn’t “ready to open up the political space.”

“It is a kind of intimidation, that people will be afraid to be a member of the opposition party.”

Ingabire herself is no stranger to such tactics, she says. In 2010 she returned to Rwanda from the Netherlands, where she was living in exile, to contest the presidential election. But shortly after that she was arrested following comments she made in relation to the country’s 1994 genocide, and accused of collaborating with a “terrorist organization.

In October, Ingabire was released from jail after serving eight years of her 15-year sentence as part of a presidential pardon.

Ingabire has long said her sentence was a result of her work as a prominent government critic and that the charges effectively criminalized her freedom of expression.

International organizations, such as Amnesty International, and a 2017 African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights ruling have condemned President Kagame’s repressive government.

Other opposition leaders unaffiliated with Ingabire’s party also allege they have been penalized and threatened for challenging the ruling party’s narrative.

Popular 37 year old Diana Rwigare a human rights activist and the leader of the People Salvation Movement (Itabaza) — an activist group to “encourage Rwandans to hold their government accountable” — had hoped to run for president in 2017. Instead she was disqualified by electoral authorities who said she had falsified signatures needed for her election bid. She was eventually jailed on charges of incitement and fraud, charges her family and supporters say were politically motivated. She spent over a year in jail, until she was acquitted of charges of fraud and inciting insurrection by Kigali’s High Court in December.

Rwigara wrote an open letter to Kagame wrote an open letter to Kagame accusing him of condoning a climate of repression and violence for people who speak out about matters of “justice” and who are “too afraid to stand up to the ruling party.”

She wrote the letter after her friend, a prison guard named Jean Paul Mwiseneza, was killed in June, shortly after speaking to her about unrest at the prison. Rwigara alleges that he was killed at the hands of “security organs.”

“Why are people being executed without trial?” Rwigara wrote.

She ended the letter with a post script that read, “I will probably face grave acts of reprisal for writing this letter. But Your Excellency, please try to understand; life in Rwanda is hard to say the least when one has to constantly worry about the fate of his/her entourage.”

Ingabire — who is unaffiliated with Rwigara’s movement — says while intimidatory measures, including disappearances and harassment, are meant to have a chilling effect, she won’t live her life in fear, and has vowed to “fight for democracy” in her country. Still, the disappearance of Ndereyimana, another voice in that fight, is a fresh and painful incident for Rwanda’s opposition. “It’s like he has vanished,” Ingabire said.

Could Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa learning more than what we are told from Rwanda?