Hopewell Chin'ono

Hopewell Rugoho-Chin'ono is a Zimbabwean journalist. He has won numerous awards in journalism and has worked in both print and broadcasting journalism. He was a fellow at Harvard. He is a documentary film maker. He was the ITV News Africa Field Producer from 2008 to 2015 and New York Times Zimbabwe foreign correspondent from 2015 to 2017. Quotes I believe in a society that respects the rule of law, that respects the vote and a society that does not encourage corruption. Those are my core beliefs. Brother Hopewell, we can’t thank you enough for the work you are doing fighting corruption in our country. I supported the idea of reforms he [Mnangagwa] was pursuing, I thought he was genuine and there was no point in criticising the coup itself because it had happened and was irreversible. For purposes of progress, it was sensible to support his reforms. Fast forward to October 2018, I had realised there were no reforms, that was when I started making noise. Fighting corruption is something that we should all do, and it’s not my fight alone. We don’t have to wait for a moment of inspiration to start fighting corruption. It’s something we should do every day. I’m not afraid of getting arrested. Perhaps they might want to kill me. I’ve gone past that mentally. I’m not afraid of getting killed anymore because I know that I would have died for a good thing. I mean, look at what I did on Sunday. I simply sat behind my computer played an instrumental and sang on top of it, and it’s gone viral around the world. The conditions in our prisons are terrible. They are horrible. To start with, a lot of prison inmates die in these prisons because they don’t have access to proper healthcare. For instance, when my doctor came to see me, he wanted to check my blood pressure. The prison hospital did not have a blood pressure machine, which costs five US dollars or two pounds. The quality of our diet is extremely terrible. The prisoners are woken up in the morning and they are given porridge, which is nothing. In the afternoon they are given beans which is boiled with nothing, without cooking oil or tomatoes or onions, with badly cooked cornmeal, and the same diet, the same meal is repeated in the evening. And that’s what they have 24/7 for 365 days. Sometimes they will get spinach if they are lucky, but that’s the diet they get. When I was arrested in July, it was COVID-19 time and we were actually under a lockdown. And we were about 2,500 to 2,700 prisoners with no masks. My co-accused at the time and I were the only people that were actually wearing masks whilst in prison. They didn’t have masks. The state could not provide masks, and this is a result of the looting of public funds that I always talk and write about. It is about the plunder of Zimbabwe’s national resources. Journalism in Zimbabwe has suffered the same way as other professions have suffered. It’s not disconnected from the economic circumstances in the country. So, you find that a lot of journalists were laid off. Some of the big companies that were operating in Zimbabwe folded so there’s no advertising for the media and the quality of journalism has really gone down, because journalists need funding and most of the funding was coming through advertising. I was last arrested on 8 January. It was my third arrest, and I came out of prison last week. I’m fine, physically and mentally. I was released from a maximum prison and I’m now home. But I consider even my existence outside the maximum prison is of one who is in jail, because you are constantly being intimidated, harassed and you are not able to do your work as a journalist the way that you should be doing it. The third time I was arrested, it was supposedly for posting something on Twitter which implicated a police officer who was supposed to have killed a child. The fact of the matter is the police and the state lied in court when they said I had done that. I never tweeted that. Then they charged me under a law which does not exist. It was expunged from the Zimbabwean Statutes and from the Penal Code in 2014. So, my detention was actually illegal, but the magistrate upheld that my detention was legal, which is a story for another day. The second time I was arrested, a lady called Henrietta Rushwaya, who is the President’s niece, was caught at the Robert Mugabe International Airport with 6kg of gold. I got wind from my sources that they’d done a corrupt deal, so that she’s given bail without the state opposing it. When I reported that on Twitter as a journalist, I was arrested and jailed, and I spent 17 days at Chikurubi Maximum Prison, which is the worst prison in Africa. The first time that I was arrested was on 20 July, supposedly for inciting people to get involved in violence, which again was not true. I was simply doing my work as a journalist and reporting on what was happening in Zimbabwe. I had uncovered a scandal with two other journalists. The Minister of Health and political surrogates around him were looting money from a $60 million facility meant to buy and procure COVID-19 PPEs [personal protective equipment] for our health delivery system. And for that I was thrown into prison for 45 days. External links Category:1971 births Category:Living people Category:Journalists from Zimbabwe Category:Investigative journalists Category:Human rights activists