Where Were You Mr President?

Editorial from The Zimbabwean, 4 Sept 2009

The decision by President Robert Mugabe last week to grant
amnesty to more than 1 500 prisoners in order to ease congestion in jails more than anything else demonstrates all that is wrong with Zimbabwe’s leader.

His total failure to appreciate the urgency of the disaster that is Zimbabwe today,  is made worse by utter contempt for the lowly minions that we ordinary Zimbabweans must be in his eyes.
Announcing the amnesty, Ministry of Justice permanent secretary David Mangota said Mugabe had finally acceded to pleas by prison officials to grant the amnesty as a “short-term relief option to try and contain some of these challenges seriously and negatively impacting on the effective and efficient administration of prisons”.
Really? Where has the President been living that he is realising only now that the country’s under-funded and over-crowded jails are essentially death camps where, to use Judge President Rita Makarau’s words, all inmates face death from disease and hunger.
In April, a South African television documentary showed shocking images of half-naked, skeletal prisoners wasting away from hunger and disease that were smuggled from some of Zimbabwe’s jails.
What did the government (read Mugabe and Zanu (PF) who control the justice system) do?
Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa vehemently denied the prisoners shown in the documentary were from Zimbabwean jails, while prison commanders immediately launched a witch-hunt to identify and punish prison guards who had allowed South African journalists into the jails.
When Amnesty International condemned last June the inhuman conditions in Zimbabwe’s jails where, according to the world human rights watchdog, nearly 1 000 inmates died of hunger and disease in the first six months of this year alone, again what did Mugabe and company do?
They merely buried their heads in the sand and dismissed all these reports as propaganda by Western-funded NGOs out to tarnish the “good name” of Mugabe to aid a British and American plot to oust him from power.
That the government could deny the crisis in jails while prison mortuaries where running out of space to store corpses of dead prisoners and at the same time as it allowed the Red Cross to supply food to prisons because it was failing to do so, shows such disregard for human life you would never expect even from Zanu (PF).
And when Mugabe finally awakened to the mess in jails, it took three weeks for him to sign the amnesty order because, according to Mangota, there were “some delays” in the relevant papers reaching him.
But when you consider the fact that even after the order was signed no prisoner was released because officials are yet to identify who qualifies, it becomes difficult to avoid concluding that some of these people in government actually belong in jail.