Today I join others from across our game and call for Gianni Infantino to resign as FIFA President.
Infantino has debased the office that he promised to elevate. He has lied, deceived and tried to feather his own nest at the expense of the game he is supposed to serve.
He has lost the support of his senior staff, his closest advisers, the vast majority of people who devote their lives to this sport and even, it would seem, the FIFA Peace Prize winner.
It is too late to save his dignity but it is not too late to save football. He should go. Now.
#Infantinout
https://t.co/j93k5MnlK2
A 29-YEAR OLD woman from Masvingo, who was forced to lie on top of her husband while multiple ZANU-PF men raped her, also saw other MDC women raped by multiple men in 2008 at a ZANU-PF base: "The ringleaders then directed the ZANU-PF militia to rape whichever woman they had been assigned to while her husband laid face down underneath her serving as a “pillow.” The ringleaders instructed the women to take off all of their clothes. The six men assigned to me forced me to lie down where we stood. I did everything they said because I was very scared. I lay against my husband’s back and all six of the men who had been assigned to me took off their pants. One man pushed his penis into my vagina, another put his penis in my mouth, another on my ear, and the rest on other parts of my body. I began to cry in pain. As they raped me, they said I must join the ZANU-PF and defect from the MDC party. As this was happening, I could see and hear other women being raped around me simultaneously."
Electing to Rape: Sexual Terror in Zimbabwe (December 2009)
Flowers are laid at the grave of Sylvia Maphosa during her funeral in Harare on 4 August 2018, four days after Zimbabwe National Army soldiers shot her dead during a violent crackdown on a peaceful demonstration in Harare on 1 August 2018.
On 5 March 1983, Fifth Brigade burst into homes in Lupane before dawn, dragged people from their beds, accused them of being dissidents and marched them at gunpoint for three hours to a military camp, where sixty-two men and women were gathered together.
One by one, the soldiers took them outside and beat them until about three o'clock in the morning, then marched the exhausted prisoners a few hundred metres to the banks of the Cewale River, lined all sixty-two of them up and opened fire.
Fifty-five people were shot dead. Seven survived with gunshot wounds only because they lay among the lifeless bodies pretending to be dead, while Fifth Brigade moved among them, shooting wounded survivors at close range.
Those who escaped made their way home, but the soldiers returned looking for survivors. One man, shot in the chest, arm and foot beside the river, later lost an arm and a foot because of the injuries he suffered that morning.
ZANU-PF conceived and implemented Gukurahundi.
For more than four decades, the survivors and families of the Cewale River massacre have lived without answers.
They died for Zimbabwe.
They deserve justice.
On 5 May 2008, at a "re-education" meeting in Chiweshe, Mashonaland Central, led by retired Major Cairo Mhandu, ZANU-PF youths seized Joseph Madzuramhende and forced him to the ground in front of his relatives.
As they beat him, they accused him of allowing villagers to gather at his home to listen to Studio 7 broadcasts and hear the election results on his radio.
They stuffed a cloth into his mouth to silence his screams, then tied barbed wire around his genitals and fastened the other end to a heavy log.
They ordered him to drag the log with his penis as they continued beating him. When he failed, they pinned his genitals onto another log and struck them repeatedly before tying another length of wire around them and dragging him across the ground until part of them was torn away.
When the torture finally ended, Joseph could no longer walk. His relatives lifted him onto an ox cart and took him home.
He was still conscious and speaking, but his injuries were so severe that he could neither lie on his stomach nor his back. He died at about 8 p.m. that evening, propped in a leaning position because the pain made every other position impossible.
His crime was owning a radio and helping his neighbours, MDC supporters, hear the election results.
ZANU-PF murdered Joseph Madzuramhende.
He died for Zimbabwe.
@HMetro_ This is a very much avoidable accident. The place where the accident happened is a dangerous area. As you approach the road becomes narrow and the bridge or cavet is not visible no barriers nor reflections. This can be fixed in a day. Many accidents have happened at the spot.
@zimcelebs1 Why is it city of Harare and relevant institutions like local government not installing barriers and reflectors on this part of the road. How many death shld we experience for government to act? It’s sad honestly.
At about 6.45am on 13 May 2008, a white Toyota pick-up carrying ten men in plain clothes, armed with AK-47 rifles and revolvers, some wearing balaclavas and others with their faces uncovered, pulled into a narrow street in Mabvuku, east of Harare. After stopping at the wrong house, they found the home of MDC activist Tonderai Ndira.
Terrified by the sight of so many armed men, his wife called out that there were visitors asking for him.
Still heavy with sleep, Ndira replied that he needed more rest and asked her to tell them to return later.
Instead, the men dragged him from the house wearing only his underwear, beat him in front of his wife and three young children and threw him, bleeding, into the waiting pick-up.
Eight days later, his family found him in the mortuary at Parirenyatwa Hospital.
His jaw had been shattered. His knuckles were broken. He had been stabbed repeatedly, shot beneath the heart and struck so violently on the back of the head that his skull was smashed.
Tonderai Ndira was one of scores of MDC activists abducted, tortured and murdered during ZANU-PF's campaign of political violence after the March 2008 elections.
They murdered him.
In the early hours of 3 June 2008, ZANU-PF militia forced their way into the MDC office at Jerera Growth Point in Zaka, Masvingo.
Seven MDC activists were asleep after spending the day helping supporters escape political violence.
The militia ordered everyone onto the floor, then opened fire at close range, striking Washington Nyangwa and Chrison Mbano.
They poured petrol across the room and over the men lying inside before setting the office alight.
Flames tore through the small building as the activists fought desperately to escape. Some stumbled through the doorway with their clothes and bodies on fire.
Edson Ngwerume, Washington Nyangwa and Chrison Mbano never escaped the inferno.
ZANU-PF militia burned them alive.
They died for Zimbabwe.
In June 2000, ZANU-PF warlord Biggie Chitoro and party militia abducted MDC parliamentary candidate Finos Zhou and his brother James in Mberengwa West, Midlands Province.
For two days and nights, they stripped the brothers naked, beat them with an iron bar and burned them with melting plastic.
For two days and nights, Finos endured the beatings and burns, clinging to life before he died.
James crawled through the bush, his body flayed and burned, until he found help and survived.
The attack on the Zhou brothers became one of the earliest and most brutal acts of political violence in Zimbabwe's new millennium.
ZANU-PF militia abducted, tortured and brutalised ordinary Zimbabweans.
They murdered Finos Zhou.
Crossing the line in Paris, @TamauPogi wins the 2026 @LeTour and claims his fifth title 🏆💛
Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, Indurain, Pogačar.
Welcome to the five-time club, Tadej 🤝
Record, equalled. History, made.
#WeAreUAE | #TDF2026
"When the tenth Zanu-PF man finished raping me they said they were going to rape my daughter. I cried out but I could not even stand up at this time. After they finished with me, they raped my daughter when I was there and I couldn’t do anything to stop them. My daughter was five years old. They instructed my son to take off his little sister’s clothes. When he refused they beat him and he eventually had to take off her clothes. During the rape my daughter was crying and trying to resist but they kept pushing her down. I was confused and in shock and I had no strength to say or do anything or even move."
—A woman from Harare raped in the run up to the 2008 general elections.