Munya

THIS MUST STOP. I have spent decades in uniform defending a Zimbabwe I believed in. I have watched governments rise and I have watched them rot. I have held my tongue when discretion demanded it. I am holding it no longer. What is being done to my comrade, retired Air Marshal Henry Muchena, is a disgrace that strikes at the very soul of this republic. For days now, State security officers have pursued him and his wife wherever they go. Visual evidence of this surveillance has been released to the media. A retired senior military officer a man who served this nation with honour is being hounded like a common criminal, together with his wife, for the simple act of expressing a political opinion. Let us be clear about what happened. Air Marshal Muchena, together with a group of Retired Generals and former senior civil servants, met with President Emmerson Mnangagwa to express our principled opposition to Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3 the so-called CAB3. We went in good faith. We spoke as men who have served this State, who have bled for it, who have built the very institutions now being turned against us. The President abruptly ended that meeting with the words: "Whoever wins, let them win." We took those words for what they were a dismissal, not of us as individuals, but of the constitutional order we fought to establish. What we did not anticipate was that the State security machinery we helped create would be deployed to harass and intimidate a retired Air Marshal and his family for daring to disagree. This is not governance. This is political persecution dressed in the uniform of State security. The irony is almost too painful to articulate. As a young boy, Henry Muchena went to war to help liberate this country. He returned home and helped build the military establishment that is now being used to hound him and his wife. He fought to free Zimbabwe, only to find himself being persecuted by the very State he helped create. If a whole General can be hunted like this surveilled, followed, intimidated in his own country what of an ordinary citizen? What of the teacher in Murewa, the vendor in Mbare, the student in Mutare who dares to raise a voice? Disagreeing with a constitutional amendment is not a crime. It is the essence of democratic citizenship. CAB3 seeks to extend presidential terms, abolish direct elections, and dismantle the safeguards our Constitution painstakingly built to prevent exactly the kind of executive overreach we are now witnessing. The Constitution's Section 328 was designed as a poison pill against self-serving amendments a protection the framers knew would one day be tested by men who confuse the State with themselves. The use of State security institutions to silence opposition voices is an abuse of power that no soldier of conscience can watch in silence. We did not liberate this country so that its security apparatus could become a private enforcement unit for political intimidation. We did not build an army, an air force, and an intelligence service so they could be turned on retired comrades and their wives for holding an opinion. To the young officers in our security services today, I say this you swore an oath to the Constitution, not to a man. You serve the Republic of Zimbabwe, not a political faction. When you are ordered to surveil a retired general who fought for your freedom to wear that uniform, you are being asked to betray the very purpose of your service. Think carefully about the orders you follow. History has a long memory, and so do the people of Zimbabwe. To President Mnangagwa, I say this Whoever wins, let them win is not a constitutional principle. It is not a governing philosophy. It is the language of a man who has forgotten that power in a republic is borrowed, not owned. Retired Lieutenant General Winston Sigauke Mapuranga. War Veteran.