Zimbabwe calls for help as minister admits prisons crisis

Zimbabwe calls for help as minister admits prisons crisis

WAITING TO DIE: Prisoner Brian Gumbo seen eating isitshwala/sadza on the SABC programme

HARROWING: A prisoner has water poured over him for a morning 'shower'

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Posted to the web: 01/04/2009 21:37:22
ZIMBABWE'S Justice Minister has admitted to the dire conditions being experienced by the country's 14,000 prisoners.

"Economic hardships are hitting hardest inside prisons," Patrick Chinamasa, a member of President Robert Mugabe's Zanu PF party, recently told parliament.

"There are no uniforms; food requirements are not being met. We are required to meet a statutory diet but it is not being complied with; rations for prisoners are not being supplied due to inadequate funding. We have recorded malnutrition cases."

Chinamasa's admission came a few days before Tuesday's broadcast on South African television of an investigative documentary programme showing images of prisoners reminiscent of the worst of the continent's famines.

The Special Assignment documentary "Hell Hole", was secretly filmed and graphically illustrates conditions in two of Zimbabwe's 55 prisons, showing emaciated inmates surviving on a daily handful of sadza/isitshwala, the staple food.

A report by Zimbabwe's Association for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation of the Offender, an NGO advocating the rights of prisoners, said at least 20 inmates were dying daily in the country's jails.

High Court judge Nicholas Ndou said after a recent tour of prison complexes, where he witnessed juvenile and adult prisoners incarcerated together, that there "were prisoners suffering from skin diseases such as pellagra, and respiratory diseases. Several corpses were placed in a room for several days and were in an advanced stage of decomposition."

Pellagra is a disease caused by a lack of vitamins and proteins.

Chinamasa denied that cholera, which has killed more than 4,000 Zimbabweans since August 2008, had broken out in the prisons, although he admitted there were incidents of dysentery.

Prison officers, who declined to be identified, said cholera was rampant in the prisons because water infrastructure had collapsed.

Previously, prisoners would cultivate food gardens and practice animal husbandry, but "senior politicians started taking free prison labour for use on their own farms, resulting in production going down", one prison officer said.

He added: "In some instances, implements on prison farms were looted by senior politicians."

Chinamasa told parliament: "We are working on a feeding scheme. Zimbabwe Prison Services seeks to mobilize material to increase farm produce at its farms for nutritional support to inmates."

The arrest and detention of Roy Bennett, the Movement for Democratic Change's designated deputy minister of agriculture, highlighted the dire conditions experienced by the 14,000 prisoners in the nation’s jails.

On his release, Bennett told local media: "There are gross human rights abuses behind those walls ... Five people died while I was inside and it took the prison officers four to five days to remove the bodies. The situation behind there is pathetic."

The SABC film's producer, Johann Abrahams, told the BBC the Zimbabwean government was now "appealing for donor aid".

"They're looking for... humanitarian aid to help them with food, clothing, legal assistance for prisoners, all of that," said Abrahams, the executive producer of the South African Broadcasting Corporation's Hell Hole documentary.

"They just can't cope. They acknowledge that they have a serious problem and obviously it's the previous government [of President Robert Mugabe] that should be answering these questions," Abrahams said. - IRIN

HORRIFIC: A prisoner bathing from a bucket (Pic: Sokwanele.com)
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