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Student leader arrested at UZ
Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU)
September 14, 2006

The state security agents in an evil alliance with UZ security officers arrested Promise Mkwananzi, the Zimbabwe National Union (ZINASU) President at the university campus this morning. Mkwananzi has since been taken to an unknown destiny after the lawyers from NGO Human Rights Forum were refused access to see him whilst he was still at UZ security control room. It is alleged that Promise was picked up in connection with the Mutare ZINASU General Council meeting, for publishing false information that is detrimental to the state and for allegedly intending to connive with the ZCTU protests which confirmed Zimbabwe's status as a police state. This brings to two the arrested ZINASU officials after the unwarranted arrest of Benjamin Nyandoro, a ZINASU Programmes Officer, yesterday.

It is our submission as ZINASU that the Zimbabwean police force has lost its mandate of executing its duties with a pedigree of professionalism by accepting to be used a pawn of the ruling party which intends to cling to power through hook and crook. The police must be reminded of its duties enforcing the law, rather than pursuing its newly found job description of being security officers of the ruling party, executing the Zanu PF culture of bloodshed and violence.

The students will never tier in their struggle for an inclusive educational dispensation. Education must not be a preserve of the elite; it's a fundamental right of every citizen by virtue of being human. If the police and the state seek to redefine this globally accepted definition then both its masters and the police itself have virtually become an illegitimate force.

In this same light, ZINASU deplores the arrest and subsequent torture of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Union leadership and members for demanding salaries that are in line with the Poverty Datum Line. It is our profound position that ZCTU is fighting for a cause, which if achieved will result in these parents managing to send back their children to school. The consistence by the state through the partisan police in arbitrarily muzzling of the citizenry's freedoms should be resisted with all the contempt it deserves. It has no place in civilized societies and divorced from the spirit of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). ZINASU holds that a people driven constitution will aid in the emergence of a new socio-political and economic order that is free from such state madness. Time is on the side of the truth and victory belongs to the fearless.

Defending academic freedoms in Zimbabwe.

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