As in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, nothing is ever as it appears on the surface in what one journalistic wag has nicknamed “Mugabeland”.
This is Zimbabwe, the politically and economically tattered Southern African country President Robert Mugabe has straddled like a Colossus since independence in in 1980.
This fantasy world is particularly poignant for journalists working for The Daily News and The Daily News on Sunday, the independent newspapers published by Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ).
Their saga could be a summary of “The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party” — chapter seven of the famous children’s tale — in which the March Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse contradict Alice at every turn, correcting her with confusing arguments that have their own strange logic.
In ANZ’s case, whenever the company celebrates what it believes to be a victory in the court case launched against it by the government last September, it turns out to be another humiliating Waterloo. The latest such incident occurred after the Harare High Court ordered the police to vacate ANZ’s printing premises in the Southerton industrial area of Harare. The police have occupied the building on and off since September.
The company’s lawyers interpreted the ruling to mean the essence of their application: resumption of publication until the Supreme Court rules on ANZ’s application to be registered by the Media and Information Commission (MIC).
But the government claimed the ruling did not entail resumption of printing — only the removal of the police.
This was not the first time the government had outfoxed, not only ANZ, but the judiciary itself.
A ruling by an Administrative Court judge last year, again declaring the company could resume printing, was shot down by a minister as “academic”.
Before that, there had been a bizarre twist in the case. Another Administrative Court judge had been forced to recuse himself from passing judgement because — or so it was claimed in the government paper, The Herald — he had told a passenger in his car that he intended ruling in favour of ANZ.
The case was eventually decided in ANZ’s favour by another judge, who received a death threat from people claiming to be war veterans.
The Minister for Information and Publicity, Jonathan Moyo, has been in the thick of the set-to between the government and ANZ, whose original sin was not to register with the MIC, the lynchpin of the restrictive Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
By some calculations, the Act is probably as restrictive of press freedom as any laws conjured up by the Nazis. Its description of a falsehood, for which a journalist can be jailed or fined heavily, is so imprecise one scribe joked that it could turn journalists into politicians or civil servants — both masters of gobbledegook, doublespeak and obfuscation.
Moyo has been pilloried by the independent media as the ruling Zanu-PF’s Goebbels, which ought to intrigue German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who is currently visiting South Africa. His talks with President Thabo Mbeki are expected to touch on Mbeki’s role as an honest broker between Mugabe and his political nemesis, Morgan Tsvangirai of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The decision by the 52 Commonwealth members in Abuja last month to extend Zimbabwe’s suspension over Mugabe’s flawed re-election in 2002 must have grievously wounded Mbeki’s political ego. But to have expected his colleagues to endorse the imagined success of his “quiet diplomacy” suggested a naive, simplistic reading of their mood.
Mugabe has done nothing to endear himself not only to the majority of his own people since the suspension, but to his peers in the Commonwealth.
Could Mbeki have waved the banning of ANZ newspapers as a shining example of the alleged excellent good governance for which Mugabe ought to be rewarded?
Clearly on instructions from on high, the police and the MIC are frustrating the implementation of every judgement made in favour of ANZ in its struggle to resume publication.
In defying the rulings of the judges, the government seems to be implementing Mugabe’s threat made a few months ago. The president announced publicly that in future, if his government did not agree with a court judgement, it would ignore such a judgement.
The rule of law in Mugabeland, it would seem, is now as problematical as logic is in Alice’s Wonderland.
Bill Saidi is editor of The Daily News on Sunday