“It is clear from the facts that at the time the State security agents kidnapped the applicant from home and
later detained her at the secret place, they did not have reasonable suspicion of her having committed the
criminal offence she was later charged with. They then used torture, inhuman and degrading treatment
during interrogation to extract from her information or evidence on which they expected that the public
prosecutor would act as a basis of a reasonable suspicion of her having committed the criminal offence with
which she was then charged.” This is according to the judgement handed down by the Constitutional court
and ordered a permanent stay of criminal prosecution. (September 2009 although the full judgement was
only available in 2012)
Twelve years later today, I still wonder why I was abducted. My mother did foresee something terrible
happening, after she saw a two headed snake while working in the fields a day before. I thought she was
being unnecessarily superstitious, but mothers will always feel the pain of their children before it even sets
in. In less than 10 hours after her phone call, I had been force-marched out of the house, bare foot, without
my glasses and in my night clothes. For 21 days I was held incommunicado, and subjected to physical and
psychological torture.
They extracted a confession. It is a fact that I was not abducted, tortured and detained as a class D prisoner
for a further 68 days at Chikurubi maximum security prison because a disgruntled police officer had
approached the Zimbabwe Peace Project. It is also an undeniable fact that there were no young people
recruited and none were ever sent to Botswana for training; I was accused of having “recruited or attempted
to recruit or assisted in the recruitment of Ricardo Hwasheni to undergo military training in Botswana in
order to commit any act of insurgency, banditry, sabotage or terrorism in Zimbabwe” sometime between
June and July 2008. Only one frustrated police officer is said to have been recruited and the same police
officer was also abducted at a traffic light in Harare and was a protected state witness.
On one of my trips to Botswana years later I met a Botswana official who together with others was seized
with investigating the issue of the training of young people in that country as alleged by Zimbabwe. Initially,
the Botswana delegation was supposed to be joined by representatives from Zimbabwe who at the last
moment pulled out of the fact-finding misson…they knew they had lied.
The fact that the then Minister of State security Didymus Mutasa signed a certificate protecting the
abductors who perpetrated torture implies their identities are known but still none of them have accounted
for their actions despite the constitutional court having ruled, “The Court unanimously concludes that the
State through its agents violated the applicant’s constitutional rights protected under ss 13(1), 15(1) and
18(1) of the Constitution of Zimbabwe to the extent entitling the applicant to a permanent stay of criminal
prosecution associated with the above violations.” The Minister argued that the perpetrators were on official
duty. The fact that perpetrators are rewarded and not made to account insinuates they can continue to
violate the rights of citizens. are rewarded and not made to account insinuates they can continue to violate
18
the rights of citizens.