Police beating claims Tsvangirai bodyguard, months later

By Lance Guma
25 October 2007

MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai’s long serving bodyguard, Nhamo Musekiwa, has died in South Africa from complications sustained during an assault by state security agents in March this year. The 37 year old had been guarding Tsvangirai since 1999 when the party was formed. At the time of his death he was recuperating at a hospital in South Africa. This followed the brutal assaults on Tsvangirai and several other activists after an aborted prayer rally in Highfields. Musekiwa accompanied Tsvangirai to Machipisa police station when the MDC leader sought an explanation as to why the police were blocking the Save Zimbabwe prayer rally that day.

He was arrested together with Tsvangirai and shared the same cell. A statement from the MDC says Musekiwa helped Tsvangirai when the party president fainted from the torture he was being subjected to at Borrowdale Police station. Musekiwa’s relative, Caisson, is adamant his brother never recovered from the assaults and torture as evidenced by his constant vomiting of blood since March. In an interview with Newsreel MDC party spokesman Nelson Chamisa said several of their activists suffer the same fate. They get picked up by state security agents, assaulted and months down the line succumb to their injuries. This he said was a developing pattern and the state knew the deaths would be less prominent months down the line.

Meanwhile a day after opposition officials met Home Affair Minister Kembo Mohadi to discuss the scourge of political violence directed at the opposition, new reports suggest nothing has changed. The MDC ward chairman for Mutare central Tobias Gundavakura had his head sliced open by a machete-wielding attacker believed to be a Zanu-PF youth. In Chipinge 3 MDC officials were abducted by Zanu PF supporters. One of those abducted is an aspiring MDC candidate and was taken to a police post near a shop owned by Enock Porusingazi, a Zanu PF Member of Parliament and Central Committee member.

Asked if the meeting with Mohadi was nothing but a damp squib given the continuing violence, Chamisa said they were under no illusions as to the character of the people they were dealing with. ‘You will never have a rapist boasting that they rape people,’ he said but the MDC want to help create an environment that, ‘tames the demon of terror’ within Zanu PF. ‘Their sincerity is not for us to judge, we have put our case forward and before the ink has dried events today prove our case,’ he said. However Chamisa warned there was a limit to the violence they can take. He said many of the members bore scars which ‘are not hereditary but given to us by Zanu PF.’