Zimbabwe’s last ‘independent’ newspaper has bowed to pressure to tone down its critical stance. Former Financial Gazette assistant editor and columnist. Iden Wetherell mourns the demise of his country’s free press.
DID you jump or were you pushed? The question from colleagues was understandable, given the mounting list of casualties in the Modus House massacre — last month’s ruthless purge of staffers at Zimbabwe’s pre-eminent independent newspaper, The Financial Gazette, flagship of troubled Modus Publications.
I had the satisfaction at least of handing in my resignation. That same day a memo had arrived from management banishing reference to “personalities” in the news, an unambiguous reference to President Robert Mugabe who is entering the final week of an election campaign. The same memo sought to limit unkind references to Zimbabwe’s leadership by reminding staffers of the need to produce a newspaper that was “truly Zimbabwean in context and character”.
This Orwellian injunction was part of an attempt by Modus chief executive Elias Rusike to “restructure” The Financial Gazette to make it more palatable to Zimbabwe’s rulers after unprecedented attacks on the newspaper in the state and ruling-party media.
It was the newspaper’s satirical comments which raised high-level hackles. When Mugabe referred last year to the human rights body, ZimRights, as an organisation of “ZimLooters”, The Financial Gazette’s Muckraker column replied that such charges were inappropriate emanating from the chairman of Robbers and Muggers (RobMug) Ltd.
Zanu PF’s organ, The Peoples Voice, charged the intention of Financial Gazette writers was to “play havoc with the minds of the majority … This psychological warfare has as its objective the brainwashing of Zimbabwe’s media practitioners so that they adopt anti- national and thus anti-Zimbabwe attitudes”.
What the party and government really objected to, of course, was The Financial Gazette’s exposure of high- level corruption, its advocacy of constitutional reform, and its insistence upon fiscal rectitude. In a society where ministers are largely unaccountable, where presidential posturing is reported as divine revelation, and the fiscus is regularly plundered by the ruling party to sustain its administrative functions, The Financial Gazette’s approach was indeed subversive.
Modus proprietors obediently responded to official complaints by suspending their editor and muzzling journalists. Instead of standing by the editor they silenced him.
The Financial Gazette will now be unable to reveal anomalies in the land redistribution process that have favoured an official elite; nor will it be able to raise questions about government’s spending priorities which have led to the collapse of hospital services and the closure of training institutes while Mugabe and his cabinet award themselves salary increases of up to 134%.
In my four years as assistant to editor Trevor Ncube and as a columnist committed to disclosing the connection between flawed governance and national impoverishment, I was privileged to serve a newspaper with the courage of its convictions — situated at the cutting edge of Zimbabwe’s democratisation process. That process has suffered a serious blow with the effective silencing of The Financial Gazette’s voice and Ncube’s departure. By their actions, its timid proprietors have ensured — wittingly or unwittingly — that the country’s well-entrenched ruling elite no longer has to answer for its conduct, a situation perilous to good governance and inimical to the interests of all Zimbabweans.
Iden Wetherell is a Harare correspondent to the Mail & Guardian.