On July 28, Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. Three days later she was arrested during a two-women anticorruption protest in the Harare suburb of Borrowdale.
It’s absurd that a “mini rally of two” calls down the might of the state. But it is unsurprising, given the irretrievably corrupt and morally bankrupt regime of Emmerson Mnangagwa, who is every inch the despot that his predecessor, Robert Mugabe, was.
This was evident as his regime hounded journalists, including Hopewell Chin’ono, who has been in prison for two weeks on bogus charges. Last week, desperate to do the same to another journalist, Mduduzi Mathuthu, they kidnapped and tortured his relatives.
The regime now says it will repay white farmers whose land was taken. It’s a transparent ruse to dupe funders, including the International Monetary Fund, into believing the country isn’t the poster child for a failed state.
And yet SA, at a time when President Cyril Ramaphosa is chair of the AU, hasn’t so much as lifted a finger.
But the business community need not be so impotent: every minute that any SA company stays in that rotten country is a validation of the murderous regime. No financier should send more than $1 to Mnangagwa without being fully aware it’ll only go to pay his security forces to beat the country into submission.
Martin Plaut 