Zimbabwe's starving prisoners face life of hell
August 12, 2003 Edition -1
Basildon Peta
If anyone thought the millions of people relying on donor food aid in rural Zimbabwe are the real faces of starvation, they're wrong.
Visit a jail in Zimbabwe and encounter hunger first hand, according to inmates of the country's notoriously filthy and overcrowded prisons.
One such prisoner, Kizito Mulenga (28), who gave a graphic description of his ordeal in prison to Zimbabwe's Daily News, equated life in Zimbabwe's jails to life in hell.
The Zimbabwe government's failure to pay food suppliers due to a crippling cash crisis and the general economic hardships are taking a debilitating toll on the prisoners, who often have to go without meals.
Even prominent politicians and activists like Movement for Democratic Change spokesperson Paul Themba Nyathi, National Constitutional Assembly chairman Lovemore Madhuku, and others who have been jailed say the pain of a short stay in a Zimbabwean jail is like a death penalty.
Madhuku and Nyathi said even though prisons were never meant to be places of comfort, they were also never meant to be places of such unmitigated abuse and cruelty.
Mulenga said when a Harare magistrate denied him bail, instead ordering him to spend two weeks in remand prison awaiting trial for armed robbery, he did not expect a holiday at the state prison.
But when the warder opened the heavy doors to usher him into his cell, he said he realised that the fortnight he was to spend inside Harare Remand Prison would be a tough test of endurance.
He said the overcrowded cell was to prove the least of his worries, even though the one malfunctioning toilet resulted in human waste, urine and water being deposited on the floor.
Mulenga, who is now out of prison after the charges against him were dropped, said: "We were always hungry. The meals are not regular and most of the time we would only have one badly prepared meal a day.
"That is where I really witnessed starvation at its worst because 90% of my cellmates did not have relatives who could bring them food."
Prison officials said they can no longer afford to feed inmates from the budget allocations to the prisons.
