The Political Space for NGOs in Zimbabwe: Past and Present

Public Seminar:

Zimbabwe’s political landscape has been far from even over the past four-and-a-half post-independence decades. In the first decades of the 1980s, under the early one-party state rule of President Robert Mugabe, there was a mix of both expansive investment in primary education, healthcare, infrastructure and agriculture that offered great hope and promise – yet alongside this were the massacres in Matabeleland and Midlands by the same state to decimate an ethnicised opposition.

The 1990s saw more open political space and the growth of critical civil society and even the formation of a new and viable opposition party in 1999, the MDC, as ‘democracy’ spread across the African continent following the fall of the Berlin Wall. But this decades this was simultaneously an era of Structural Adjustment in Zimbabwe that put both economic and political pressure on the Zanu (PF), Mugabe-led government.

Political contestation intensified, and together with land invasions and mass displacements from the early 2000s onwards, generated intense political violence and a chronic political and economic crisis that has continued to the present. Infighting within Zanu (PF) and mass discontent led to the so-called ‘coup’ again Mugabe in 2017, and the entrance of Emmerson Mnangagwa as President since 2018. Along these different eras, the political space for NGOs as well as more overtly political actors, has varied.

In this public seminar, drawing directly on her own experience and beyond, Dr Shari Eppel from Zimbabwe will discuss the shifts in political space over this extended period for the work of NGOs – in particular Human Rights NGOs – focusing especially on the current diminishing space under the present ‘second republic’ regime of President Emmerson Mgangagwa.

Dr Shari Eppel is a psychologist and forensic anthropologist who has worked for close to three decades in the NGO sector in Zimbabwe. She is Director of Ukuthula Trust based in Bulawayo, which focuses on exhumations and reburials together with communities in Matabeleland provinces of those murdered and ‘disappeared’ by the Zimbabwe state primarily during the dark period of Gukurahundi in the 1980s.

The event is co-costed with the Danish-based human rights organisation Nunca Mas, whose members have co-operated Ukuthula Trust and its predecessor, Solidary Peace Trust (also led by Shari) since 1999. The content of the co-operation has varied depending on the historical situation, but by constantly exploiting the political space available to work for human rights.

Professor Amanda Hammar from CAS, herself a Zimbabwean, will chair the seminar.