President Robert Mugabe’s government has published new laws that make it a crime to gesture rudely or swear at his high-speed, heavily armed motorcade.
The road traffic regulations issued on Monday state that when the presidential motorcade — usually comprising about 24 vehicles — passes, anyone nearby ”shall not make any gesture or statement within the view or hearing of the state motorcade with the intention of insulting any person travelling with an escort or any member of the escort”.
Mugabe’s motorcade — colloquially known as ”Bob and the Wailers” because of the sirens of the accompanying motorcycle escorts — includes 4X4 vehicles packed with heavily-armed soldiers, sedans carrying plainclothes secret police and an ambulance, at the back.
At the centre is Mugabe’s bullet-proof stretch Mercedes Benz with dark-tinted windows. No reason was given for the new regulations, but it was suggested that passersby had often made offensive signs or shouted at the passing vehicles.
David Coltart, legal director for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said his party’s supporters had been arrested for chanting the party slogan, ”chinja!” (change) and waving the MDC open-hand salute when Mugabe passed.
”If anything is an admission that your subjects dislike you, it’s these regulations,” he said.
When the convoy sweeps down the road, all other vehicles are forced by the to pull to the side of the road and stop. The regulations stated that ”the driver of every vehicle on the road on which a state motorcade is travelling . . . shall halt his vehicle”.
The regulations add to the armoury of laws meant to uphold ”the dignity” of the 78-year-old Mugabe. Under the Public Order and Security Act passed earlier this year, anyone who ”makes an abusive or indecent or obscene or false statement” about the president can
go to jail for up to a year.
Last week a Harare magistrate acquitted MDC activist Kevin Gota on charges of ”denigrating the president”. Police arrested him in March this year for declaring, ”Down with Mugabe, he is an old man”.
The magistrate said the words were ”not abusive of the state president in any way”.
The week before, police arrested a 40-year-old for holding up a placard in a busy Harare township shopping centre that read: ”God shall confront Mugabe over evils done to people. Then would the police and the Central Intelligence Organisation (secret police)
arrest god on that day?” – Sapa