By Vivid Gwede|After a castle guard, Marcellus, saw the ghost of the dead king walking over the palace walls at Elsinore in William Shakespeare’s famous play Hamlet, he exclaimed, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
With the ghost of the former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s old dispensation that Zimbabweans thought had been buried in November 2017 ironically coming back alive, surely one can say something is rotten in the State of Zimbabwe.
The comedy of the names is that the “rotten thing” in Zimbabwe can be found in a little street called Rotten Row, where there is the infamous Magistrates Court.
The court chambers of Rotten Row have become the theatre of a comic show that can only be aptly nicknamed “The Treason Drama”, whose authors is the so-called New Dispensation led by President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
The political tensions in the country have been stocked once more with the arrest on Monday, July 9, 2019, of the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) National Vice Chairman, Job Sikhala, on treason charges.
If one is convicted, the charge carries a potential prison term of up to 20 years in Zimbabwe’s poorly kept prisons, and even before/without conviction one may be imprisoned in them for weeks on routine remand.
According to the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), this arrest brings to 21 the number of people arrested on charges of subverting a constitutionally elected government under Section 22 of the Criminal Law and Codification Act since January 2019.
Since independence in 1980, the Zanu PF-led government has been in the habit of throwing this charge book on its perceived political opponents, including the high profile case of the late founding MDC president, Morgan Tsvangirai, in February 2002.
However, the rate at which this charge has been thrown at human rights activists and opposition politicians since the disputed 2018 elections has recently assumed a worrying dimension, symptomatic of attempts to use prosecutions as a whiplash of persecution.
The government of Zimbabwe through these latest allegations paints the picture that for seven successive months three attempts have made to remove it illegally every month, including by three women.
This crackdown has not only been in the courts, but has taken a physical turn.
Since August 1, 2018, about 27 people have been fatally shot, on pretexts related to destabilising the government, during civilian protests, an average of two people per month, for the past 12 months.
The impression is that of a serious conflict between the state and the citizens.
The above rate of arrests or fatalities does not bode well for the country’s human rights record, which historically has been tarnished by 39 years of authoritarian rule and is in terrible need of repair.
Given the fact of a deteriorating economy and rising household poverty, no Nobel Prize is given for guessing the reason behind the ongoing attempts to suppress the citizens, using both the law and force.
Recently, the government imported riot gear and small arms, showing its intentions of silencing the people of Zimbabwe as the economy nose-dives, dragging the ordinary people’s standards of living into a free-fall.
With barely one year after claiming victory in the disputed 2018 harmonised elections, the ruling party Zanu-PF is moving further away from its promises of a New Dispensation, towards old ways of authoritarian rule.
The calls for a genuine national multi-stakeholder political dialogue process should be implemented before the situation further worsens.
For the sake of the country, the political leaders must stop paying lip-service to the issue of dialogue to address the political and economic problems, which have been caused by the dispute around the 2018 harmonised elections.
The political dialogue will give Zimbabwe a second chance to turn-around the country’s fortunes after the missed opportunity of November 2017, where the ruling party Zanu-PF misled by its hardliners decided to ignore other stakeholders in resolving the national crisis.
Since that ill-advised “chinhu chedu” (“it’s our thing”) error committed after the removal of Mugabe, numerous calls for dialogue from citizens, civil society organisations, business, labour, political actors and diplomats have swelled into a chorus, which cannot be gainfully ignored.