Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe, it is even more restricting to criticize the president of the country. Although this practice was more predominant under the rule of the former president, Robert Mugabe; the country’s current president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has not decriminalized this.
Terrence Mkhwananzi is on trial for pointing at a presidential portrait at a public hearing in the city of Bulawayo. In front of the Commission of Inquiry, an independent body mandated to investigate the Aug. 1 post-election violence, Mkhwananzi accused President Emmerson Mnangagwa of being responsible for his father’s death.
A year since Mnangagwa seized power from his former mentor Robert Mugabe and declared the beginning of a new era of freedom, it is still a crime in Zimbabwe to criticize the head of state.
Mkhwananzi says his father was killed in December 1986 during ethnic massacres in the southern and western parts of the country. As minister of state security at the time, the country’s new leader Mnangagwa is accused by the opposition and local activists of being complicit in the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade operation in the 1980s which killed at least 20,000 civilians living in the Midlands and the Matabeleland North and South provinces.
