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.
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%.
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.
Zimbabwe security forces killed seven unarmed protesters in Harare just after the Southern African country’s first election without Robert Mugabe on the ballot. Nearly two months later, President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s Zanu PF government continues to persecute the opposition while proposing a post-Mugabe economy that favours unfettered global capitalism.
British Prime Minister Theresa May’s much hyped recent visit to Africa sought to create a solution to Britain’s likely post-Brexit economic woes rather than promote a development agenda benefiting Africans.
