The Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP) says the ruling ZANU PF party has been implicated in the harassment and abduction of opponents in the past two months.
In its May monthly report released this week, ZPP said ZANU PF is intimidating rural folk ahead of the 2023 general elections. Reads the report in part:
The patterns of intimidation and harassment, abductions and assaults implicating the ruling party continue unabated.
It is of great concern that over the past two months, the ZANU PF government, which was the major perpetrator of the 2008 electoral violence and other forms of atrocities before that, is on a systematic drive to intimidate citizens, especially those in rural areas ahead of the 2023 elections.
ZANU PF allegedly unleashed an orgy of violence targeting MDC-T supporters during the 2008 presidential election runoff between the late former President Robert Mugabe and the late MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Tsvangirai eventually withdrew from the race citing violence against his supporters, leaving Mugabe to run a one-man race.
Meanwhile, ZANU PF director for information Tafadzwa Mugwadi dismissed the ZPP report saying the organisation is funded by the country’s detractors to tarnish the ruling party’s image. Said Mugwadi:
We have no regard for ZPP and all those associated with it and its entire puppet discourses.
It is an organisation manned by neo-imperial elements funded to tarnish the people’s agenda as represented by ZANU PF.
They have no shame nor spine, no facts nor truth but vendetta-laden discourses tailored to salvage waning relevance in the non-governmental organisation sector and in the process, receive donor handouts. ZPP can safely go hang.