MDC activist dies of torture wounds
JOHANNESBURG – A tortured MDC activist died recently from the injuries
that he sustained when he was tortured by state security agents and other
supporters of President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu (PF) party after the elections
last year.
Gift Nhidza (32), a former security officer in the MDC, died two weeks
ago in Odzi – a politically-volatile area in the country’s eastern province
of Manicaland.
Nhidza, popularly known as “Children”, lived as a political refugee in
Johannesburg’s Central Methodist Church during the past year, after fleeing
several attempts on his life by Mugabe’s supporters. He returned home last
month, after his already failing health had taken a turn for the worse.
Nhidza, also a former soldier, sustained horrific injuries when he was
brutalised by Zanu (PF) torture gangs in 2008, allegedly at the instigation
of then minister of transport, Christopher Mushohwe.
The MDC activist, whose worst injury was the seven fractures sustained
on his right leg, walked with the aid of crutches. He also sustained three
fractures on his left leg and several others on each of his arms while being
beaten with iron bars at a torture base in Odzi.
After the torture he was left for dead, dumped on the road inside
Spiro farm so that he would be crushed by trucks in a stage-managed road
accident. But he woke up in time to roll into the bush, from where he was
taken in a wheelbarrow by his younger brother.
His spinal cord was also damaged in three different parts as a result
of the beating and was admitted to a private hospital in Mutare for seven
months, but fled when the CIO made attempts to visit him in hospital.
Nhidza was being accused, in part, of having been deployed by the MDC
in South Africa to train bandits that would later be used to topple Mugabe,
an allegation that the octogenarian ruler has always preferred against his
opponents in a bid to decimate the opposition.
“He died a couple of weeks ago and we are told that he has since been
buried in his home area,” said Solomon Chikohwero, Chairman of the MDC
Veterans Activists Association (MDC VAA), of which Nhidza was a member.
“People like Nhidza cannot just go unnoticed because they are some of
the heroes that contributed a lot in Zimbabwe’s on-going fight for
democracy.”
Posted by Raymond Mhaka
on November 10, 2009. Filed under Local News.
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