It was the worst at night when he and more than 100 other inmates were all locked up from 3pm to 6am. They piled up on the floor next to each other to share lice-infested blankets left behind by previous inmates.
During his time in jail, Kunyenzura frequently saw many inmates resort to defecating in plastic buckets. "The toilets don’t have a flushing system or don’t have the sitting bowls. Of the few that do, the flushing system doesn’t work," he told Al Jazeera.
Kunyezura, a clergyman and leader of the Zimbabwe Transformative Party (ZTP), would silently pray that no one would suffer bouts of diarrhoea. But one night, a case of badly cooked spinach triggered a messy episode, and the inmates had to endure the putrid smell of faecal waste for up to 15 hours before it was cleaned.
"It was a crisis," he told Al Jazeera. The buckets were not enough."
Misheck Nyembe, a 72-year-old pensioner who spent 13 days behind bars in January for attending a political meeting the police had not given a permit for, told Al Jazeera that the prison was "infested with lice" and his body was itchy for weeks after his release. Nyembe, who ate only food provided by his family during his detention, said the prison meals were only "fit for pigs".