A SENIOR MDC-T official was this week arrested on charges of allegedly insulting Vice President Joice Mujuru.
Godfrey Chimombe, the party’s Mashonaland Central provincial chairperson, appeared before a Bindura magistrate Friday charged with undermining the authority of the President and granted US$200 bail.
According the MDC-T, Chomombe was arrested on Wednesday for allegedly insulting Mujuru at a party rally held in Bindura some two weeks ago.
“Chimombe who is also the Mashonaland Central Joint Monitoring and Co-ordinating Committee (Jomic) chairperson was arrested on Wednesday in Bindura on charges that he insulted Mai Mujuru at an MDC rally held at Nyakatondo Business Centre in Mt Darwin North by claiming that Mai Mujuru killed her husband, General Solomon Mujuru,” the party said in a statement.
“The rally, attended by the senior MDC national leadership and hundreds of MDC members, was held two weeks ago.”
General Mujuru, a liberation war hero and the first commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces after independence in 1980, was killed when an unexplained fire razed his Beatrice farm house last August.
It is illegal to criticise or undermine the President under Section 33 of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act but Chimombe’s case may be the first time a person has been charged for allegedly insulting a Vice President.
His case is the latest in a string of prosecutions against several people and organisations charged under the controversial statute.
In December MDC-T legislator, Lynette Kerenyi, was briefly jailed after she was accused of insulting Mugabe at a rally where she criticised his stance on homosexuality.
The following month a bookshop owner was arrested under suspicion of undermining the President after he stocked copies of Tsvangirai's autobiography at his store in the town of Victoria Falls.
Again, last August private security guard Zebediah Mpofu was held by police and warned he faced a year in prison after he allegedly joked about the state of Mugabe’s health.
And a couple of months before that a police officer was detained for two weeks after he was caught using the Mugabe’s private toilet at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) in Bulawayo.