How the CIO was perverted

How the CIO was perverted

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By Silence Chihuri

A NATIONAL intelligence organisation as the name would imply, is supposed to be a symbol of national excellence, honour and pride and not a dreaded tool of brutality and persecution as our own Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) has been turned into.

Gone are the days when our young man and women would dream to one day join the prestigious organisation and serve their country as some of finest citizens of our nation.

The CIO was inherited from the white colonial regime having been first introduced by the then Rhodesian Prime Minister Winston Field in 1963 as part of new intelligence arrangements at the end of the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The first one to head the new look Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation was Kenny Flower, a Deputy Commissioner with the BSAP Special Branch.

The CIO was initially designed as a civilian mode of the Rhodesian Intelligence Corps that was more militaristic in its outlook. Flower who was distinguish by all intelligence standards, was to said to have been an ex MI6 operative and had been also linked with other European intelligence organisations.

The only relevance of Flower here is that at independence the new Zanu PF government took him over to carry on heading the CIO. The intriguing element in the hiring of Flower was of course his switching of allegiances and this was viewed as vindication by his critics who had earlier labelled Flower as the doublest of all double agents because he was suspected to be working with the nationalists to destabilise the same Rhodesians on whose pay roll he was. Flower’s earlier links with MI6 were also relevant in that the M16 was also working to unsettle the Rhodesian regime and arm-twist it to accept the then embryonic Lancaster House agreement. So it was a real intelligence web really that Flower crawled from.

Notoriety has always dogged the CIO regardless of the complexion of the government and this goes back to the 1970’s when the as yet to be demystified myth of the chemical and biological warfare that was allegedly unleashed onto the liberation forces allegedly on the instigation of the then Rhodesian CIO. The CIO was said to have enlisted the expert services of chemists, scientists and doctors from the then University of Rhodesia to select and conduct trials on a variety of chemicals some of which were later used in the evil attempt to annihilate our nationalist fighters.

The notorious Selous Camp in Mt Darwin was said to have played a key role in providing a secret rendezvous for the inhuman testing of the lethal chemical cocktails on human guinea pigs most of whom were uncelebrated detainees who were serving sentences for various security and war time charges. These could simply be unaccounted for without raising any eyebrows because they were barely known, and the CIO Special Branch ensured the professional and untraceable disposal of the bodies into disused mine shafts. That’s just as chilling as it can get really.

When the new government took over in 1980 they maintained more or less the same intelligence arrangements but the CIO was to gradually and steadily gain more relevance and as much if not more notoriety as it never really seized to be dreaded. Most people would be forgiven for innocently thinking that the CIO was going to shed its shadowy image and be moulded into a professional organisation that was inspired by excellence and national pride. That kind of transformation could have happened from the early years of independence going onwards, but what happened was simply a racial transformation as white operatives were replaced with their black adversaries, and the black recruits would even prove to be more overzealous than their white predecessors.

From the man in dark glasses driving around in Datsun Pulsars and Mazda 323’s looking to bundle their targets into the secrecy of their car boots; or the mysterious men who would follow people to their door step and ‘warn’ them about the dangers of challenging the authorities, to the menacing and extremely imposing arm of oppression into which the government has turned the CIO. There are still echoes of the CIO’s dark past in the form of the most high profile cases such as that of Rashiwe Guzha and Patrick Kombayi, and the shadowy present of cases such as that of Chiminya and Mabika and all the others who have perish at the behest of the CIO.

Today the CIO is the most dominant arm of our nationhood and they control virtually everything; from gobbling the biggest chunk of the national budget ahead of health delivery; the CIO enforce controls of commodity prices; they pore over every passport application; they control foreign exchange; they pry over telecommunications; the CIO is now at the heart of the print media controlling newspaper publications.

Even the national police force is now second fiddle to the CIO as they cannot arrest them. As if all that is not enough there is this most dreaded characteristic of the CIO that is brutality. The CIO operatives subject fellow citizens to acts of sheer brutality with the full sanction of the government because now the de facto role of the CIO is to sustain the government at any cost, and in turn, the government overlooks actions of any sort perpetrated by the CIO.

Now the CIO virtually controls the government even holding it at ransom because the people have long rejected that government and it is merely in power through brute force and ministers compete in pursuance of the favour and loyalty of the CIO. CIO operatives are allowed to evade justice for years because the long arm of the law gets shorter and shorter whenever it involves them, with the authorities heaping praise upon praised on the CIO where they are supposed to condemn them unequivocally.

There is no longer any separation between the CIO and government and all the other arms of government, and the CIO no longer seems to owe any national duty to the people of Zimbabwe to protect them and respect them. The primary role of the CIO seems now predominantly, to be one of instilling as much chilling factor in the lives and spirits of Zimbabweans as possible, and this is regardless of the fact that the organisation is sustained solely by the same people through the taxes that they pay. Democracy and human rights have been completely destroyed by the actions of the CIO with full government blessing because they are allocated exorbitant budgets simply to hound harmless ordinary people and politicians alike either to their death, or simply into oblivious submission.

If the CIO served the people of Zimbabwe, it would have long disposed of the government because today the organisation holds more clout that any other single entity in Zimbabwe but sadly, that clout is being abused rather used to inflict untold misery on the nation. The latest submission by the CIO that the people of Zimbabwe have since been fed up of the government and that they are more than ready to topple the regime does not only confirm the obvious, it does point to a very important and encouraging aspect, that even the CIO itself is at tenterhooks and can no longer keep propping up the crumpling regime.

The CIO strain is being felt even where the money and resources are abound because the situation of government failure in our country is no longer confined to cosmetic cover up. The situation is now so dire that it will still crumble and swallow up even those who are preserving the status quo with the sweat and blood of Zimbabweans, and the same Zimbabweans shall prevail and overturn the odds in the face of those that have for so long persecuted them.

If the CIO were to be as honourable as they should be, then this is the time for the organisation to side with the people for the first and lasting time, and assist the people openly and proudly, to overthrow the regime because a one day sit-in by the organisation will deliver the nation for years to come. The damage being done to our country each day is another year added on the process of repairing that damage. The effects of that damage shall be felt by generations of Zimbabweans regardless of who they are and this will include the children and grandchildren of CIO operatives.

Silence Chihuri is a regular New Zimbabwe.com opinion writer

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