HARARE – Harare West MP Joana Mamombe was arrested on Tuesday evening, charged with Electoral Act violations, her MDC party said.
“She is accused of providing a false address to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission before elections last July,” MDC spokesman Jacob Mafume told ZimLive.
She is expected to appear in court sometime on Wednesday.
It is the second time Mamombe, the MDC’s youngest MP at age 26, has been arrested this year. She is currently on bail on treason charges emanating from violent protests against fuel price increases decreed by President Emmerson Mnangagwa earlier this year. Prosecutors say she planned to overthrow the government.
Mamombe secured the MDC ticket to run in Harare West after her rival, Jessie Majome, pulled out of the race.
Majome claimed Mamombe was not qualified to stand in the constituency on two grounds: “There is a qualification in terms of the criteria set by the party; only people who have been members of the party for five years can contest. To the best of my knowledge, my opponent does not meet this criteria.
“We also have a problem with clear dishonesty by my opponent. My contestant does not reside in Harare West, but I have been made to understand that she used an address where she does not live, in the process deceiving the party.”
Mamombe, a former student activist with ZINASU, studied biotechnology at Chinhoyi University of Technology. She later attained a Masters Degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Bergen in Norway, and returned to Zimbabwe in 2018 to run for MP.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International has condemned the arrest of two human rights activists by authorities at the Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport on Monday in a mounting onslaught on non-governmental organisations.
The two, Stabile Dewah, 35, and Rita Nyamupinga, 61, bring to seven the number of human rights defenders arrested at Robert Mugabe International Airport in the past seven days as they returned from a capacity-building workshop on non-violent protest tactics in the Maldives.
“These human rights defenders are facing trumped up charges for exercising their human rights. They should be released immediately and unconditionally. The charges against them fit into a much wider pattern of repression we have documented in Zimbabwe,” Muleya Mwananyanda, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for Southern Africa said.
