MEDIA-ZIMBABWE: Last Independent Voice May Disappear

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Jan 22 2007 (IPS) - The last of Zimbabwe’s independent media voices would disappear if the publisher of the country’s two remaining private newspapers loses his Zimbabwean citizenship, warn civil society activists and journalists.

Trevor Ncube, who owns a majority share in both the Zimbabwe Independent and the Standard weeklies, was prevented from renewing his passport in late December 2006. The government of President Robert Mugabe claims he is Zambian by descent, a charge he denies.

“The two newspapers are the most authoritative in Zimbabwe in terms of covering the ruling ZANU-PF,” Daniel Molokela, a Zimbabwean lawyer, with the Johannesburg-based Zimbabwe Combined Civil Society Organisations, told IPS in an interview.

Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, has been in power since independence in 1980. It introduced draconian media laws after the opposition posed a serious challenge to the government in 2000.

“ZANU-PF is tying to get rid of Ncube’s newspapers in Zimbabwe. They are trying to push him so that he gets a South African passport. If he does, he will lose majority shareholding in the papers. Then they will not be critical of Mugabe,” Molokela said.

Zimbabwe does not allow dual citizenship. And Ncube says he has not acquired a foreign passport.

Defending the system, the state-appointed Media and Information Commission (MIC), which is charged with licensing and registering journalists and media houses, has denied that the government of Zimbabwe is intending to seize control of Ncube’s newspapers.

Ncube lives in South Africa’s commercial hub of Johannesburg where he publishes the weekly, Mail & Guardian publication.

“This is a desperate attempt to muzzle the media. There are only a few independent publications in the country. The government wants to make sure that there’s no newspaper that is critical of the Mugabe regime,” Frank Chikowore, a Zimbabwean freelance journalist, told IPS by phone. The Weekly Times, Chikowore used to work for, was shut down in February 2005, just seven months after it was launched.

“Ncube is lucky because he has a big name behind him. If it was some unknown individual like me, nobody would have heard about the announcement to strip me of my citizenship,” Magugu Nyathi, coordinator of the independent, Johannesburg-based Cross Border Association of Journalists, said laughingly in an interview with IPS.

Media watchdogs such as the International Press Institute and Reporters sans Frontieres have expressed their concerns about the threat to strip Ncube of his citizenship.

So have local media groups. In a statement in December, the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) said it “supports Ncube in his endeavours to obtain legal redress through the Zimbabwe High Court, but believes the proper course of action would be for the government to give him his passport, stop interfering with his freedom of movement and to leave his papers alone.”

Ncube’s lawyers have yet to secure a date for the hearing from a Zimbabwean court.

The Sanef statement, signed jointly by the organisation’s chairwoman Ferial Haffajee and its media freedom sub-committee convenor Raymond Louw described the attempt to harass the publisher as “a serious inroad in what is left of media freedom in Zimbabwe and Ncube’s personal freedom.”

Only a national can own a paper under Zimbabwean law. Foreigners are barred from holding more than a 40-percent share, thus losing editorial control of the publication.

Ncube’s newspapers are not the first to suffer the wrath of the establishment. In March 2003, the Media and Information Commission (MIC) shut down the Daily News – the country’s only private daily, which was accused of being an opposition mouthpiece.

Nyathi believes Ncube is the victim of a lack of law in Zimbabwe. “We don’t have a proper constitution. We are using the Lancaster House Constitution, negotiated in London when preparing for independence from white rule in 1979, to strip Ncube of his citizenship,” she said.

Many Zimbabweans believe that behind the brouhaha over his citizenship is the state’s real dislike of the private media. “Ncube was born in Bulawayo (Zimbabwe’s second city). He grew up in Bulawayo. His father, born in Zambia, was Zimbabwean,” Malokela said. “This is not a legal case. It’s a political case.”

Ncube’s Mail & Guardian, Jan. 19-25, 2007 issue, has quoted Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka complaining that Mugabe has let Africa down. “He has become power-intoxicated, he is a liberation fighter whom we all admired and we held up as a model. He has let us down. He is obsessed with power, intolerant and despotic,” he said.

“I consider him (to be) no better than Idi Amin (former Ugandan dictator) except that he is constrained from going the whole hog. The conduct of Mugabe is a betrayal of what we have fought for on the African continent,” Soyinka said.

Zimbabwe, with a runaway inflation of over 1000 percent, used to be the grain basket of southern Africa. Now more than four million of its estimated 13 million people depend on food aid, according to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

Zimbabweans are also tiring of the long running political crisis, which Mugabe continues to blame on former colonial power Britain and its white kin settlers in the country.

“If you want to be happy forget about people like Mugabe. They will give you blood pressure for nothing,” Malokela said wryly.

(END/IPS/AF/SA/WA/IP/HD/IC/PF/MN/AN-LD/07)