For Duncan Maseko, then 41, the inclusion of the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC), a statutory body tasked with searching for truth and ensuring past injustices are remedied, gave him hope. He could finally know the truth about his father, who had been abducted from their home three decades ago. Maseko was not alone in investing his hopes in the NPRC. The NPRC also appeared to be an answered prayer to tens of thousands of others who had suffered various injustices and were searching for truth and closure. But as the ten-year tenure of the commission draws close, Maseko and the others are thoroughly dejected. “To me, the NPRC is just a circus,” Maseko, now 51, tells Minority Africa. “My only wish is to have full information on the remains of our loved ones.” Shortly after Zimbabwe’s independence, friction between ZANU-PF and PF-ZAPU, two former liberation movements, boiled over into armed conflict. In 1982, then Prime Minister, the late Robert Mugabe, responded by deploying the Fifth Brigade, his special North Korean-trained army unit, to the western parts of the country – strongholds of the opposition PF-ZAPU. During the five-year (1982-87) campaign of terror that followed, over 20,000 people died, and thousands of others were maimed, raped, or simply went missing. Maseko’s father, Sam, was one of the over 20,000 people unaccounted for. A former Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) combatant during the armed struggle that resulted in Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, Sam was abducted from his home in Bulawayo, the country’s second-largest city, on February 11, 1984, by state security agents and just like thousands of others, never to be seen again. Most of those so rounded up ended up at Bhalagwe, a Nazi-style detention camp 100 km south of Bulawayo, where they were gruesomely tortured – many of them to their deaths. By the time a cold peace was established through a lopsided Unity Accord of December 1987, Gukurahundi, a full-blown genocide, had taken place against the Ndebele tribal minority. Since the signing of the Unity Accord, efforts by survivors and families of the victims of the Gukurahundi genocide to get closure have been resisted for more than three decades by successive governments of Zimbabwe. The closest former president, Robert Mugabe, came to acknowledge the Gukurahundi atrocities was describing them as a “moment of madness.” Still, he resisted calls for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, similar to one that was convened in South Africa in the aftermath of Apartheid, to bring closure to the survivors. Since coming into power in the November 2017 coup, President Emmerson Mnangagwa – who stands accused of masterminding the atrocities as State Security minister, Mugabe’s right-hand man – under pressure from survivors and relatives of victims, held a series of consultative meetings with civic groups and traditional chiefs to find common ground on the issue. But critics rightly doubted the genuineness of his commitment, as in 2020, his government tried to exhume mass graves in the Midlands and the Matabeleland provinces without getting anyone to account for these killings. This drew the ire of family members and human rights groups that accused the government of trying to prevent a more thorough historical accounting of the genocide. Organisations like Ibhetshu LikaZulu, which had three memorial plaques erected for Gukurahundi victims at Bhalagwe blown up by suspected security agents, vehemently oppose any government involvement in the healing process. “Under no circumstances should there be any government-controlled exhumations and reburials of Gukurahundi genocide victims,” the group’s coordinator, Mbuso Fuzwayo, said in a statement. The pressure group argues that healing and reconciliation cannot start with mass exhumations and reburials, and certainly not if they are conducted by the government, who happen to have been the perpetrators of the genocide, or those it controls. They insist that exhumations should be done by an independent body and should come after, among other things, an acknowledgement of the genocide and the release of the Chihambakwe and Dumbutshena commissions’ reports. The two commissions were set up by the government after public outcry during the massacres in the mid-1980s, but successive governments of Zimbabwe have refused to release their findings. Analysts say when the NPRC was included in the new constitution, although the hopes were misplaced, it was only natural for those affected by Gukurahundi to hope for closure. The commission was forced into the constitution by the opposition during the country’s four years of inclusive government and turned out to be an unwanted foster child under the ZANU-PF government.