Anti-Mugabe activist discharged from hospital

Political activist Sylvanos Mudzvova was yesterday discharged from a local hospital where he was receiving treatment after he was reportedly abducted and tortured by unknown assailants last Tuesday.

Mudzvova - who was seized at gun point from his home - said he will seek medical attention in South Africa after doctors failed to ascertain a chemical he claimed to have been injected with by the abductors.

Unknown gun-toting assailants are said to have driven him to an unknown location where they assaulted and interrogated him over funding of activities by the radical Tajamuka/Sesjikile pressure group, to which he is member.

"I have been discharged from hospital after a successful operation," Mudzvova said yesterday, adding that "I remain committed to the struggle and values of all the movements in this ruined country of ours".

Mudzvova — a veteran actor who once staged a one-man show in protest against President Robert Mugabe — said he had lost count of his arrests over involvement in protest plays and political satires but teasingly remarks that it has got to a point that he does not know the difference of being "inside or out prison".

He has had several run-ins with the police, dating back to 2007. In April this year, Mudzvova was arrested in Harare for staging the one-man play Missing Diamonds, I Need My Share in front of the Parliament building.

This was after Mugabe had remarked that $15 billion in diamond sales could not be accounted for by foreign miners, including the Chinese.

Mudzvova intended to stage the play at Parliament and at the Chinese Embassy but his plan failed to materialise after he was arrested five minutes into the act.

At that time, he claimed he had been warned that he would "disappear" like fellow one-man protester and anti-Mugabe activist, Itai Dzamara, if he continued with his demonstrations.

Back in 2007, Mudzvova and Tongani Tongani were arrested at the premiere of the controversial satire titled The Final Push.

The play, written by the Mudzvova, was about the chairman of a building called Liberty House (Mugabe) and his political challenger (presumed to be opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai) who were trapped together in an elevator following a power failure.