The mention of Rutendo Benson Matinyarare’s name evokes emotions.
His admirers praise him as a courageous and patriotic Zimbabwean who devoted his energy and resources to fighting sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by the West with verve and vigour.
They point to the relentless campaign launched by the Zimbabwe Anti-Sanctions Movement (ZASM), a civil organisation formed by Matinyarare, to fight against what he terms western imperialism.
His supporters, both at home and in the diaspora, revere him for waging an effective anti-sanctions crusade which dominated social media platforms.
They also point to his advocacy work aimed at creating awareness on the difficulties afflicting the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and highlighting solutions to bringing sustainable peace and security to the region.
But detractors chide him as an over-enthusiastic character motivated by an unbridled desire to always hog the limelight.
They say everything Matinyarare touches courts controversy referring to the many feathers that he has unruffled especially on his micro blogging X platform.
His critics say he is unpredictable pointing at what they say was a dramatic somersault from being a hard-hitting critic of the Rwandan leadership to being a strong supporter of President Paul Kagame and his country.
But Matinyarare has taken the disparagement in his strides justifying his actions as championing a struggle to unite Africa by erasing the misinformation and tribal differences entrenched by the colonizers to keep Africans divided and conquered.
On his decision to abandon his anti-Rwanda stance, Matinyarare insists that he was able to assist in ending the war in Goma in 2025, only because he learned and articulated publicly that the problem in Congo is a colonial creation that has exacerbated tribalism which has kept Africans divided and allowed the west to keep looting African resources while we fight each other.
According to him, it took a trip to Congo and Rwanda during the Battle of Goma in February 2025 for him to learn that the Congo crisis began in 1886, after the Berlin Conference partitioned and separated 43% of the Rugwanda Kingdom (the ancient Kingdom of Rwanda) and its people, the Kinyarwandans, into what was then designated as the eastern part of King Leopold’s Belgian Congo, by the stroke of a pen on a map.
However, because this eastern part of Congo lies within the Kibaran Belt, it is endowed with some of the richest reserves of strategic minerals in the world, making it the envy of the world. Consequently, this led various leaders of the DRC—from Mobutu and others after him—to create tribalist policies that discriminated against and excluded Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese people from politics, land ownership, and conscription into the army and police.
Additionally, they created militias such as the Mai-Mai and worked alongside former Rwandan genocidaires like the FDLR, to cooperate with the Congolese army to target and persecute these so-called outsiders—over 11 million Kinyarwanda-speaking people—in an attempt to ethnically cleanse them or displace them from their ancestral lands in Congo and push them back into Rwanda without their land.
All this, he argues, was done intentionally so that the Congolese state could take control of this rich land and allocate it to international mining interests.
After years in which over a million Kinyarwandans were killed and many more displaced as refugees into neighboring countries, the community was forced to create a resistance movement known as the CPD, which later evolved into today’s M23, to defend themselves from persecution by their own government.
Matinyarare says that Kagame—fearing that over 11 million Kinyarwanda-speaking people could be displaced as refugees into Rwanda, a small country with limited land and resources—was compelled to support the resistance struggle of Kinyarwanda-speaking people in eastern Congo in order to prevent a massive refugee crisis at home.
By articulating this untold story of the war between Rwanda and Congo on his social media pages in February 2025, Matinyarare contends that after the Congolese government saw him talking to the leadership of M23, they got in touch with the administration in Harare to ask them to ask him if M23 were ready for negotiations, because they were. He informed that that they were ready for negotiations.
Within a week of this engagement on the 11th of March, 2025, the Angolan President announce that the Congolese government and M23 would start negotiations to end the war. Two days later on the 13th of March, 2025, Sadc led by the Zimbabwean President, ED Mnangagwa agree to put down the guns and pullout their soldiers from Goma, to give dialogue a chance. And by the 23rd of March the DRC and M23 announced a ceasefire.
His supporters praise him for his active role in spreading greater awareness of the conflict in the eastern DRC.
The tough-talking Matinyarare argues that the AFC/M23 are not terrorists but Congolese citizens defending their rights.
In his widely followed social media documentaries, Matinyarare argued that the AFC/M23 is not a proxy of Rwanda as widely reported by the Western media but Congolese citizens fighting for the civil rights of the vulnerable Kinyarwanda-speaking community and Congolese Tutsi.
He accuses the Congolese military of using tribal segregation against the Congolese Tutsi and Kinyarwanda speaking communities.
Observers are convinced that Matinyarare’s documentaries and firsthand evidence forced the SADC to reconsider its military intervention in the eastern DRC.
In his sequel of documentaries and posts, Matinyarare argued that Sadc was wasting resources and lives to support a corrupt Kinshasa government which is seeking to decimate the Congolese Tutsi and Kinyarwanda speaking communities.
Apart from advocating for the rights of the persecuted communities, Matinyarare’s documentaries also strongly campaigned against a military solution in the eastern DRC emphasising that negotiations are the panacea to ending the crisis.
Questions are now being asked. Who is Rutendo Benson Matinyarare?
Matinyarare is a prominent anti-sanctions strategist who is also the founder of Zimbabweans Unite Against US War Sanctions (ZUAUWS), a platform he formed to “educate Zimbabweans, Africans and the world about the sanctions the US government imposed on Zimbabwe in 2001 and 2003, their impact and how we should counter them”.
He is also a brand architect, marketing strategist, and CEO of a through-the-line marketing and brand consultancy Frontline Strat Marketing Consultancy.
“I have been in marketing for over 25 years and have developed the knack of telling a good story to nullify negative sentiment and to raise awareness for complex issues,” Matinyarare says.
He is a fellow of the Institute of Marketing Management of South Africa alongside the Chartered Institute of Marketing (UK), and a PRINCE2 Project Management Practitioner who can make unpopular issues mainstream, without a budget, as he has done with sanctions on Zimbabwe.
Matinyarare stormed into the limelight when he launched a spirited campaign to fight against US, United Kingdom, and European Union sanctions that had been imposed on Zimbabwe.
He is credited for convincing the government to depoliticise its fight against sanctions by launching a national, regional, and continental legal, multilateral, and publicity campaign against the restrictive measures.
His public narrative on how the sanctions were persecution and hence a crime against humanity and should be challenged in multilateral bodies and international courts—caught the attention of a US Congress senior advisor (who is unwilling to be disclosed by name).
This culminated in the Congress senior advisor contacting him in May 2021 to seek clarity on his organisation’s position.
Matinyarare says he met the Congress senior advisor in July 2021 and articulated the illegality of the sanctions and the culpability of the US government for not undertaking impact assessments of their sanctions on human rights in Zimbabwe.
A month after the meeting, the US Congress Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Global Human Rights, Health and Organisation, led by Karen Bass, approached the Political Actors Dialogue (Polad) to inform them that they would be undertaking an impact assessment of their sanctions to see how they were impacting civilian human rights and health, not only in Zimbabwe but across Africa.
“The intention of the subcommittee was to mitigate and eliminate the impact of sanctions on civilians”, Matinyarare said.
Matinyarare says the same day that Polad received the communiqué from Congress, members of their anti-sanctions committee contacted him asking for assistance to compile a report on the impact US sanctions have on Zimbabwean human rights and health.
“The culmination of this exercise was that the Congress subcommittee wrote a report to (former US president) Joe Biden asking him to remove the executive order sanctions on Zimbabwe because they were hurting civilians,” he said.
Matinyarare said at about the same time, he and Justice and Parliamentary Affairs minister, Ziyambi Ziyambi, convinced the United Nations Human Rights Council to come to Zimbabwe and conduct an impact assessment on the negative effects of sanctions on Zimbabwe.
He said this saw the special rapporteur for the negative impact of sanctions, Alena Douhan, denouncing sanctions on Zimbabwe as illegal and depriving Zimbabwean civilians of the enjoyment of their human rights.
With the release of the UN report on the negative impact of sanctions on Zimbabwe, Matinyarare, as chairperson of the ZASM, led the organisation in instituting a court application in the Gauteng High Court in South Africa, for a declaratory order, that would make it illegal for South African financial institutions, companies, and third parties to implement illegal unilateral sanctions.
Through his work, Matinyarare successfully exposed the illegality of Western sanctions on Zimbabwe and, by so doing, got the UN, the US Congress, and SADC to measure the impact of these sanctions on Zimbabwe, and to denounce them.
Matinyarare says this gave rise to an opportunity for ZASM to embarrass the US President by dragging him through African courts to hold him accountable for perpetuating crimes against humanity upon Zimbabweans.
Again, he worked to get Sadc countries to march against these illegal sanctions every 25th of October since 2019, resulting in SADC and AU leaders making it a point to demand the removal of these illegal Western measures at every multilateral gathering.
“All this, in the end, proved too much for the US government, leading them to remove sanctions on Zimbabwe in order to save face,” Matinyarare said.
Matinyarare’s supporters see this as a testament to his integrated strategy and execution which compelled the US government to remove its illegal sanctions .
Not to the outdone, Matinyarare has dabbled into the controversial Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 3) Bill, 2026 which seeks to among other things, extend President Emmerson’s term beyond 2028.
While Matinyarare is supporting the bill on the basis that extending the election cycle to seven years will reduce perpetual electioneering, he has warned against bypassing a referendum.
He argues that passing the bill without a referendum carries "too many risks," including creating internal divisions within the ruling Zanu PF, reviving a stagnant opposition, encouraging protests, and potentially triggering new sanctions from the West.