The Ministry of Justice is facing fresh pressure to overhaul its prison facilities, after the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was finally ‘allowed’ to begin work on improving conditions at the prisons.

Andre Jaross, the ICRC deputy head of delegation in Harare, said the organization began work two weeks ago at Chikurubi Maximum Security and Harare Central prisons, and would soon extend its work to other jails across the country.

The government reached an agreement with the ICRC to work in the prisons following shocking reports that emerged in the media that brought international condemnation.

Film taken secretly in the prisons showed living skeletons, unable to move, and makeshift mortuaries filled with bodies. A prison sentence in Zimbabwe today is almost a guaranteed death sentence. Prisoners who have no family to bring them extra food are virtually guaranteed a slow and very painful death.

Shepherd Yuda, a former prison officer, told us prisoners are packed into dark, airless, lice-infested cells, where they are exposed to life-threatening diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis, for which they receive little or no medical treatment.

Yuda urged the ICRC to do more than simply assess conditions in prisons, and urged them to evaluate inmates’ requirements and prepare a report for the government. He said they should call for an overhaul of the whole prison system, starting from top to bottom.

Yuda blames Prisons Commissioner Paradzai Zimondi for the decay in the prison system. He said that before Zimondi took over the country’s prison system was one of the best in the Southern African region.

‘We used to have standards and guarantees about the treatment of prisoners: an individual, whatever his or her crimes, must not be tortured; must not be held in unsanitary or unsafe conditions that could place him in danger or lead to his death; he is entitled to adequate nourishment and medical care. He is, above all, entitled to his dignity. Yet this basic right is routinely being flouted throughout the prison system in Zimbabwe,’ Yuda said.

‘Every single level of authority in our country has failed our prisoners. Overcrowding and tight budgets create an atmosphere ripe for disease, abuse and violence. Right now our prisons don’t help rehabilitate anyone. Conditions in the system create monsters instead of reforming,’ Yuda added.

Human-rights groups have also voiced their concern about the prison conditions in the country. They said it will take a major reform of the entire system to eradicate the kind of practices prevalent in the prisons.

ZimOnline reported on Monday that a local prisoners’ rights group, the Zimbabwe Association for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation of the Offender (ZACRO), said at least two inmates die everyday from hunger and disease at Chikurubi and Harare Central – the country’s two biggest jails.

The Website said most prisoners have to survive on a single meal per day of sadza and cabbage boiled in salted water, because there is no money to buy adequate supplies.

The news that the Commissioner of the Zimbabwe Prison Services (ZPS), Paradzai Zimondi has made a U-Turn in his attitude towards Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai is not funny. This is the man who publicly stated that as an avowed and staunch member of Zanu (PF) he would not salute Tsvangirai if he came into power. He further stated that should the MDC come into power he would resign his post and go and defend his farm, presumably from re-possession by the state and subsequent return to the rightful owners. It is trite to say what happened in June 2008 should be forgotten because it was done for political reasons.

Zimondi is of the sick idea that all the murders that were committed during the run-up to the run-off presidential elections should be swept aside because these were crimes committed for political ends. How sick can an official be?

Zimondi also told his subordinates to stop victimizing junior officers in the ZPS as this was no longer tolerable. It is therefore obvious that prior to the setting up of the inclusive government such practice was tolerable, if not encouraged by none other than the Commissioner himself. Junior officials were always suspected of being supporters of the MDC.
This same practice is also rampant in the police force and in the military service. It is this sick mentality that the Prime Minister (PM) will find most difficult to transform in the new Zimbabwe. My view is that people like Zimondi, Chihuri, Chiwenga and Shiri, should be written off as well beyond rehabilitation for effective service in the new Zimbabwe. They
should simply be pensioned off and dismissed form government service.

They are poison among our public servants. They need to be replaced by younger and more enlightened officers who have respect for the laws of this land. It is not enough for Zimondi to advise that the anti-Tsvangirai comments that he had made in the past should be disregarded. The man has to apologise to the PM as well as submit his resignation and go home.

What is even more depressing is the fact that, by and large, these fellows are grossly inefficient in the running of their entities. For example, just one look at the picture of prison inmates sleeping at Chikurubi (published in the Standard of 29.03.09) gives you the creeps. It is unbelievable that there are human beings in this country that are forced to live like that for years.

This is one of the outfits that crazy old Zimondi is responsible for. It is obvious that some of these inmates never wake up the following day, and it is not news at all, not to Zimondi. This is one area where well-thought out reforms could be implemented without the need for massive injections of foreign assistance.

We challenge the inclusive government to tackle this serious humanitarian situation as soon as possible in order to save lives. There is little to be expected from Zimondi, whose primary concern is his farm and blind loyalty to Zanu (PF).

It is unfortunate to have to express the sentiments that for some reason, the inclusive government seems to be dragging its feet when it comes to addressing issues of gross violations of human rights and the administration of justice. Admittedly, we are still cursed with a largely partisan judiciary and a rabidly unjust Attorney General. Transforming the
judiciary and the prison systems in this country is likely to be among the last activities that the Tsvangirai government is likely to tackle. They could perhaps begin by cleaning house from the top to the bottom. Make Zimondi and his ilk go home to their farms, please!

HARARE – The government has established a cemetery at one of its biggest jails to bury hundreds of prisoners dying from disease and hunger, according to a confidential report shown to The Zimbabwean on Sunday. The report prepared by prison officials for Commissioner of Prisons Paradzai Zimondi paints a horrifying picture of conditions in Zimbabwe’s overcrowded jails, long neglected by a government hard pressed for cash and resources after nearly a decade of acute recession.

At one time, last month, prison officials had to contact a mass burial of decomposing bodies of prisoners that had been kept in a room at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison for six moths because a mortuary at Harare Central Prison was full, the report said in horrifying illustration of grim conditions in jails.

Last year saw the highest number of deaths of inmates ever recorded since Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence from Britain, said the report titled “End of year 2008 brief to the Commissioner of Prisons”.

The report was handed to Zimondi on Monday this week, according to our sources in the prison service.

Efforts to get comment on the report from either Zimondi or Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa were fruitless.

According to the report, 2008 was “the most horrific and traumatic year” for both inmates and prison wardens.

Prisoners went for days without a meal and were occasionally supplied with food “only meant to keep a person alive” such as the staple sadza (a thick porridge made from maize meal) and salted, unclean water, according to the eight-page report.

“The death impact of prisoners saw the opening of a cemetery at Chikurubi Prison Farm. The main causes of prisoners’ deaths included reduced meals, shortage of drugs and poor health environment in our prisons,” it said.

“Sir, we want to believe that 2008 had the highest number of prisoners’ deaths in the history of the ZPS (Zimbabwe Prisons Service). In Mashonaland Region alone in 2008 we witnessed a total number of 900 prisoners deaths,” according to the report.

A cholera epidemic that has killed close to 3 000 Zimbabweans since August has apparently also spread to jails, killing 234 prisoners between 23 December 2008 and 10 January 2009, according to the report.

“The most challenge we faced was living with dead bodies outside mortuaries,” the grim document said. “The situation was even very bad at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison where bodies have been kept in a room since July 2008 up to 31 December 2008 mainly because the mortuary at Harare Central Prison could not accommodate them.”

With Mugabe’s government preoccupied with trying to find money to buy food, essential medicines, fuel, electricity and for salaries for hundreds of thousands of its workers, prisoners are a forgotten lot.

More often than not, inmates in many of the country’s jails have to survive on a single meal per day of sadza and cabbage boiled in salted water because there is no money to buy adequate supplies.

An outbreak of pellagra disease in 2007 killed at least 23 inmates at the notorious Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison. Pellagra is a vitamin deficiency disease caused by shortage of vitamin B3 and protein.

Overcrowding has only helped worsen the situation with the country’s 55 jails said to be holding anything above 35 000 inmates at any given time which is more than double their designed carrying capacity of 17 000 inmates.

A parliamentary committee that toured Chikurubi and other prisons in 2006 was shocked to find inmates clad in torn, dirty uniforms and crammed into overcrowded cells with filthy; overflowing toilets that had not been flushed for weeks as water had been cut off due to unpaid bills.

The committee said in a report that the conditions in prisons were inhuman. However, nothing much has been done to date to improve conditions due to a lack of resources.

Members of Zimbabwean Lawyers for Human Rights have now spent three days parked outside Harare’s Chikurubi’s maximum-security prison, trying to get three seriously ill detainees to hospital for examination and treatment.

Last week when the prison authorities finally obeyed a court order and sent them to hospital, Zimbabwe Prisons Service Commander General Paradzai Zimondi sent orders they be taken back to their cells instead of being admitted.
Yesterday the three most seriously ill, Fidelis Charamba, 72 with cardiac failure, Gandi Mudzingwa in his 50s, with “dangerously high” blood pressure, and human rights worker Jestina Mukoko, were taken to a Harare private hospital, where they were examined by a private doctor and one from the prisons department.

Both doctors said the three should be taken to hospital. But before they could be admitted, Zimondi again ordered them back to prison.