8 MDC activists arrested for singing anti-Mugabe songs
By Violet Gonda
2 August 2007

Eight opposition activists were arrested in Mutare on Thursday for allegedly singing political songs that denounced and denigrated Robert Mugabe. Pishai Muchauraya, the MDC spokesperson for the Tsvangirai MDC, said one of the activists, Llyod Mahute the provincial youth secretary, was severely beaten by a Chief Inspector Innocent Rigomeka of Chisamba Police Station. He is being held at an unknown police station and the other seven activists are being held at Mutare Central police station. We could not get a comment from the police.

The detainees were part of a group of MDC members who had attended a remand hearing at the Mutare magistrate’s court. The hearing was about 65 people arrested on 12 March during demonstrations demanding the release of opposition and civic leaders who had been arrested the day before.
Muchauraya said: “After the court people were going home, to their respective homes using trucks, and eight people who were in our treasurers vehicle were arrested in Sakubva for allegedly singing songs that denounced the ageing President of our country, that is Robert Mugabe.”

Grassroots opposition supporters tend to sing songs mocking Mugabe to show their frustrations. Muchauraya said: “You see sometimes these days there are songs like ‘Mugabe vachembera, Mugabe ingomwa haana Mwana (Mugabe is old, Mugabe is barren he has no children), all such songs.” Poking fun at Mugabe has become a popular way of expressing the frustration of daily life under Mugabe’s rule.
Muchauraya also repeated a story that is quite often told in Zimbabwe. He said: “The fact of the matter is that man has no children of his own. He is renting Peter Pamire’s kids.”

Peter Pamire was the black empowerment advocate who was killed in a freak car accident in 1996.The website NewZimbabwe.com claimed in 2005 that a ‘hit-man’ alleged that Pamire “was killed by the Central Intelligence Organisation over an affair with President Robert Mugabe's wife, Grace.”