Renewing the United States’ long-standing sanctions on Zimbabwe for another year, President Donald Trump stated that “the actions and policies of certain members of the Government of Zimbabwe and other persons to undermine Zimbabwe’s democratic processes or institutions continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States”.
With President Emmerson Mnangagwa wrestling his deputy, ex-General Constantine Chiwenga, while the ZANU PF government continues to mismanage the economy, “there will be no happy ending for Zimbabwe in 2019,” argues Professor Stephen Chan of the University of London.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s ongoing brutal crackdown on opposition supporters, rights defenders, labour leaders, and ordinary Zimbabweans, and recent Internet blockade, “betray promises to create a new Zimbabwe,” said the U.S. State Department in a statement issued this week.
Zimbabwe security forces’ extrajudicial killing of 12 people during recent protests against the government’s hiking of fuel price by 150% has dashed Zimbabweans’ hope for real democracy under President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
In yet another clear manifestation of Zimbabwe’s burgeoning digital authoritarianism, the Mnangagwa regime imposed a total blockade on the Internet in a futile attempt to conceal security forces’ “systematic torture” and extrajudicial killing of more than a dozen people during last week’s protests against the president’s hiking of fuel price by 150%.
