ZIMBABWE has “so many hangmen” government claims that an executioner cannot be found are not credible, a Senator said during a debate in the House of Assembly.
Some 55 death row inmates await their date with the hangman – but the government says it has been unable to fill the vacancy since 2005. Several newspaper adverts have gone unanswered, say ministers.
"In our country there are so many hangmen. Maybe we are not advertising enough,” Chikomo Senator Morgan Femai (MDC-T) said while contributing to a debate on the state of prisons on Wednesday.
A potential hangmen would earn an estimated US$300 -- the same as all the country's 230,000 civil servants.
Femai’s statement was laden with political undertones with its unmissable allusion to perpetrators of political violence, but for the inmates, the life of uncertainty is proving unbearable.
At least one of the 55 prisoners has been in jail for 13 years, and he told the House Committee on Human Rights: “I’m being hanged daily because I don’t know when my sentence will be carried out.”
The parliamentary committee has recommended that the death row inmates’ sentences be commuted to life in prison, as capital punishment comes under new pressure from legislators.
“Why are we continuing with this law if we can't find a hangman?” asked Masotsha-Ndlovu Senator Enna Chitsa (MDC-T).
Obert Gutu, the country’s Deputy Minister of Justice and a Senator for the MDC-T which supports abolition of the death penalty, said many Zimbabweans would not take the job for fear it would attract “evil spirits to the hangman and his family”.
“In the African culture, a job that entails the killing of another human being is not considered a job at all,” Gutu said last week. “It is looked at with contempt and superstition, mostly because as Africans, we believe that if one kills another human being, the spirit of that person will return to torment its killer and his family.”