Itai Dzamara’s spouse petitions government
Kudakwashe Vhenge
Today March 9 2020 marks exactly five years since anti-Mugabe campaigner and pro-democracy activist, Itai Dzamara disappeared.
In 2015, Dzamara was allegedly abducted by state agents near his Harare home after defiantly staging a one-man protest against then President Robert Mugabe.
Dzamara was demanding that Mugabe surrender his job as he had clearly failed to provide accountable leadership and run the economy down.
His wife, Sheffra Dzamara this morning handed over a letter on behalf of the Dzamara family appealing to President Emerson Mnangagwa to resolve the case of her husband.
In the letter she highlighted that she once wrote to Mnangagwa in 2018, in which she received no response prompting her to make the letter public.
In her letter she narrated how painful it is for her to live without the knowledge of her husband’s whereabouts.
“Today I write again, to share my pain with you, the pain of a wife caught between hope or grief and the pain I still feel every day because of not knowing the whereabouts of my husband. I write to tell you the pain of children growing up without a father, a role model, friend, and support pillar for the family,” read part of the letter.
Itai’s younger brother, Patson who has been fronting the campaign for his brother’s safe return once stated that Mnangagwa was ignoring the Dzamara family despite numerous efforts to engage him over the alleged abduction.
“Letters and requests to meet Mnangagwa have hit a brick wall. No letter has been responded to and no request to meet him has been accepted. We have tried to meet him soon after the November coup 2017 and his inauguration but to no avail,” recalled Patson Dzamara.
When he was still Vice President, Mnangagwa told the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR) that government was actively pursuing the search for Itai. However, there have been little to no efforts by the same government to give regular updates, despite a court order issued in 2016 instructing it to do so.
According to eye-witnesses, Itai Dzamara was forcibly taken away on 9 March 2015 by five men while he was at a barbers’ shop in Harare’s Glen View suburb.
His kidnappers are said to have accused him of stealing cattle before handcuffing him, forcing him into a white truck with a concealed car registration number and driving off. He has not been seen since then.
