Zimbabwean activist Makomborero Haruzivishe has been behind bars for almost a year without trial

Many Zimbabweans had a bleak “festive” season. With inflation, public transport woes and high unemployment, Christmas Day was, for many, just another day.

Regardless of religious orientation, Christmas holidays for many of us have always been a time to rejoice, celebrate and party. I remember going to Edgars with my mother and father as a child to choose Christmas clothes. We chose Edgars because they had a credit facility and my parents could pay for their purchases in instalments.

This past Christmas, I am sure many children did not get any Christmas clothes. I doubt many had a Christmas lunch worth writing home about either.

In Zimbabwe, Christmas is also the time many of us go home to our rural areas. That is where we congregate with extended family to celebrate and enter the new year together. Many Zimbabweans lamented that this time around, they failed to go home.

There was a lot of sadness.

But while many of us were worrying about Christmas clothes, Christmas dinner, vacations and other “trivia”, my friend and comrade Makomborero Haruzivishe was wondering if he was going to spend Christmas Day in prison. As it turned out, he did.

For the past 11 months, Haruzivishe has been unjustly incarcerated by the Zanu-PF government. His crime: fighting against repression and state capture.

Haruzivishe is a 29-year-old Zimbabwean political activist who has been at the forefront of defending human rights in his country. He has been a thorn in Zanu-PF’s flesh ever since his days as a student activist at the University of Zimbabwe. At that time, he confronted the then Mugabe regime on its violations of human rights.

Mugabe’s government rewarded him by expelling him from university.

He did not stop fighting. He continued to confront the government as a youth leader in the main opposition MDCA. Haruzivishe successfully organised and led dozens of peaceful demonstrations against Zanu-PF misrule and misgovernance. This led to him being considered an “enemy of the state” in the so-called “new dispensation” of the Emmerson Mnangagwa administration.

This is Haruzivishe’s 38th stint in prison in the past decade. 

In previous arrests, he would spend anything from a few nights behind bars to a few weeks, and at times a few months. This is the longest the government has kept him locked up. In all previous arrests, he was never found guilty of any crime.

All were cases of wrongful arrest — a clear indication of the law being used as a weapon by individuals in government. They were also a clear indication of judicial capture, police capture and prisons capture, as the three institutions colluded to keep an innocent man in jail for political reasons. The capture of state institutions by Zanu-PF is an issue Haruzivishe has always been vocal about.

Before his latest arrest, Haruzivishe started the #PeoplePower campaign. He explained that he believed that we, the people of Zimbabwe, have the power to free ourselves from capture. Haruzivishe is a firm believer in the power of peaceful protest. He has always preached peace and restraint to his comrades and friends. He believes that our power lies not in our ability to be violent, but in our numbers — in our ability to protest peacefully, en masse.

In July 2020, Haruzivishe told me about a plan to “whistle for change”. He said many people were afraid to protest in the streets — understandable, as we have an extremely violent government. The plan was therefore to get as many people as possible to blow a whistle at the same time each day, to register their displeasure with Zanu-PF corruption and repression. His emphasis was on expressing dissent as loudly but as peacefully as possible.

Zimbabwean activist Makomborero Haruzivishe. (Photo: Twitter)