Africa-Press – Zimbabwe. BY any measure of democratic governance or human decency, Zimbabwe’s so-called second republic has failed catastrophically.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa, once touted as a reformist after the late former President Robert Mugabe’s ouster, has led the country not towards renewal, but into the deepest repression seen since the darkest days of the old regime.
The promise of the second republic has curdled into betrayal — and Zimbabwe is now a pariah State, choking under State-sponsored human rights abuses and a suffocating clampdown on civic freedoms.
The 2024 ZimRights Annual Report, Rising Still: Community Resilience in the Struggle for Human Rights in Zimbabwe, lays bare the appalling human cost of this betrayal.
At least 8 279 Zimbabweans — men, women and children — were victims of human rights violations in the past year alone.
This is not a statistic. It is a national tragedy.
Behind these numbers lies a system weaponising of State institutions to crush dissent and extinguish democracy.
The culprits are depressingly familiar: Zanu PF party operatives and the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP), acting not as guardians of the people, but as enforcers of repression.
Zanu PF members were responsible for over 1 300 violations, while the ZRP accounted for a staggering 4 697 incidents — a damning indictment of a police force now synonymous with brutality, not justice.
From partisan food distribution — a cynical weaponisation of hunger — to forced displacements, arbitrary arrests, inhuman treatment and the deliberate destruction of property, the breadth of abuses is both systematic and strategic.
These are not rogue acts.
They are the machinery of authoritarianism, coldly deployed to tighten the ruling party’s grip on power.
Urban centres like Harare and Bulawayo have borne the brunt of the crackdown, reflecting their roles as bastions of opposition and civic resistance.
That more than 2 700 people in these two cities alone have been affected, speaks volumes about the regime’s fear of organised, urban dissent.
In a country where political tensions are sharpened by deepening economic despair, repression has become the State’s answer to every question.
The democratic space, already thin, is being erased entirely through what can only be called lawfare — the use of legislation not to promote justice, but to destroy it.
The re-emergence of the Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Bill — a draconian attempt to suffocate civil society under the guise of regulation — is a case in point.
Activists and non-governmental organisations now operate under constant threat, navigating a legal minefield designed to paralyse their work and silence dissent.
Mnangagwa’s pledged “new dispensation”has instead become the most ruthless in the post-independence era, refining Mugabe’s legacy of repression into more insidious, bureaucratic violence.
Under the second republic, Zimbabwe is not reforming — it is regressing.
It is not opening up — it is shutting down, turning inwards and hardening into a State where the law exists to serve power, not to protect rights.
The international community cannot remain complicit through silence.
Zimbabwe is not just facing a political crisis — it is in the grip of a human rights emergency.
Sanctions, isolation and diplomatic condemnation must be recalibrated not as punishments, but as tools of solidarity with the millions of Zimbabweans suffering under this regime.
At the same time, the resilience of communities documented by ZimRights offers a sliver of hope.
Grassroots action committees, despite overwhelming odds, are daring to speak, organise and resist.
Their courage, not the hollow proclamations of the ruling elite, is the true face of Zimbabwe.
If Mnangagwa’s second republic is a house of lies, then the people of Zimbabwe must become its reckoning.
The world must listen — and act — before the door to democracy slams shut completely.
Zimbabwe deserves better. Zimbabweans deserve justice.
For More News And Analysis About Zimbabwe Follow Africa-Press
