Social justice activist, writer, author, and speaker Tendai Mbofan writing for The Zimbabwean has said the government’s efforts to cover up flimsy accusations against Hopewell Chin’ono were exposed today at the press conference held by the Ministry of Information in Harare this morning.
Mbofana opined:
Zim govt exposed, again, for its frivolous and unsubstantiated accusations of activists being Western-sponsored illegal regime change agents.
What I love so much about the Zimbabwe regime’s live televised press conferences, and parliamentary debates, is the way top government officials shamelessly stutter, struggle, and outrightly fail to adequately articulate and provide undisputed and solid evidence for all the wild and largely laughable allegations they love spewing at every turn especially, against political, labour and social justice activists, who have been at the forefront of challenging the establishment’s gross and unmatched human rights abuses, state-sponsored violence, unparalleled corruption, and notorious economic incompetence, which have resulted in the acute, cruel, and untold suffering, starvation, and deaths of millions of Zimbabweans.
This morning, the Minister of Information, Monica Mutsvangwa when placed on the spot by renowned Al Jazeera journalist, Haru Mutasa – pathetically and shamefully failed to proffer any irrefutable evidence to back her administration’s long-held wild and ridiculous allegations that those leading in criticizing the heartless brutal government, were being sponsored by Western countries, to cause chaos in the southern African nation, so as to effect illegal regime change.
This was after Mutsvangwa had unwisely held a press conference, in the capital Harare, in a clearly poorly-thought-out attempt at explaining away her government’s recent locally and globally condemned arrests of popular journalist cum activist Hopewell Chin’ono, and the leader of opposition political outfit Transform Zimbabwe, Jacob Ngarivhume, on allegations of inciting public violence (ostensibly, in order to unconstitutionally topple the incumbent regime, at the hands of an understandably angry and fed-up nation).
Mutsvangwa – who possibly over-estimated her persuasive touch had vainly tried to paint her administration’s obvious strong-arm tactics against perceived voices of dissent, as justifiable and necessary action against rogue elements, whose main agenda was to fulfill some Western countries’ apparently insatiable appetite to somehow oust the current ruling ZANU PF junta which, itself attained power through military intervention, and forced the sitting president, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, to unceremoniously resign.
When asked by Mutasa what evidence the Zimbabwe government had, to prove this link between activists, and Western powers, the best she could come up with especially, pertaining to Chin’ono was the whimsical ‘fact’ that, within minutes of the police reaching his home to arrest him, the US embassy, and other Western diplomatic missions based in Zimbabwe, were already issuing out statements condemning the arrest.
If this is what the men and women in power in Zimbabwe (most with doctorates) regard as incontrovertible evidence that those leading anti-government activities are being sponsored by Western countries then we are either being led by an insane group of people, or they have simply been finally exposed for their inexcusable lies and deception which, they have been unashamedly using in undemocratically crushing genuine pubic outrage and dissent.
