As elections in Zambia and Zimbabwe draw nearer, independent newspapers are under pressure to stem their criticism of the two southern African governments, report Stefaans Brummer, Brian Latham and Andrew Meldrum
THE leading independent newspapers in Zimbabwe and Zambia — which will both hold elections this year — are under pressure to silence their criticism of government and ruling party.
Should the newspapers, Zimbabwe’s weekly Financial Gazette and Zambia’s The Post, succumb to pressure, the governments of both countries will go virtually unchallenged in the media.
The Financial Gazette, facing collapse under financial and government pressure, has been ordered by its publisher to cut “political” reporting. And two editors and a columnist of The Post were in hiding this week after the latest government action against the paper, this time under anachronistic legislation empowering Parliament to sentence dissenters for “contempt”.
For years, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has slated the Financial Gazette as an opposition mouthpiece and “pink press”, a play on the colour of paper it uses. Despite its title — and newsprint colour — the Gazette has for years been Zimbabwe’s foremost independent political paper.
But last week Elias Rusike, proprietor and chief executive of Modus, the company which owns the Financial Gazette, ruled that the paper should go light on politics, telling staffers to concentrate on policies, not personalities — particularly that of the president. The popular “Muckraker” column was also scrapped.
Earlier in February the publisher suspended editor Trevor Ncube for a month after he published a Reuters story which claimed that Mugabe had instructed his pilots to “jump the queue”, ahead of South African President Nelson Mandela’s plane, at Maseru Airport. Last week senior journalist Iden Wetherell, who is also a correspondent for the M&G, resigned, citing proprietorial interference.
Wetherell wrote to Rusike that Ncube’s suspension was undeserved, and implied that Rusike had bowed to the will of Mugabe, saying: “Proprietors who bend to the will of politicians and party propagandists instead of defending their right to freedom of expression are unlikely to command respect at any level. Please convey that message to the other shareholders if they are proposing to remain in the newspaper business.”
But the message is unlikely to have much effect. Modus sources say Rusike’s determination to stand by his reporters’ stories dwindled after he spent the weekend in police cells last May, locked up with Ncube after the Financial Gazette ran a lead story on Mugabe’s “secret” second marriage.
When the People’s Voice, the ruling Zanu-PF party tabloid, compared Financial Gazette reporters to modern-day Selous Scouts out to “poison the minds of the people”, Rusike called a board meeting where he changed the paper’s political direction.
Despite that, Mugabe’s government has stepped up its campaign against the paper. Though the Financial Gazette is profitable, the state Zimbank has refused to reschedule its debts. Two front-page stories in the state-owned Herald newspaper have predicted the collapse of the Financial Gazette by June. The articles are seen as warnings to the business community to refuse assistance to the paper.
Rusike has seen his newspapers crumble in the face of government opposition. The Daily Gazette, which exposed corruption scandals, folded last year and the Sunday Gazette closed last month. The papers were widely read but advertisers shied away for fear of governmental disapproval. Rusike sought financial backers, but South Africa’s Times Media Ltd, withdrew when the government blocked it from buying more than 25% of the publishing house.
Thus the silencing of the Financial Gazette will leave Mugabe and his government virtually unchallenged since the remaining media are either state-owned or party-owned. Coverage of the presidential race amounts to slavish reporting of Mugabe’s speeches, while only the most scanty coverage is granted to opposition candidates Bishop Abel Muzorewa and the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole.
Meanwhile, The Post’s editor-in-chief, Fred M’membe, managing editor Bright Mwape and columnist Lucy Sichone are in hiding to avoid arrest for being “in contempt” of Parliament.
Paramilitary police visited the journalists’ homes this week after they failed to appear last Friday before Parliament’s Standing Orders Committee, which appears to have the power to impose sentences of up to 12 months, with or without hard labour.
The Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa) said the journalists were “maintaining a low profile” as lawyers prepared papers challenging the action against them.
The contempt charges followed articles published by The Post critical of an attack in Parliament by Vice-President Godfrey Miyanda on supreme court judges who had ruled earlier that sections of the Public Order Act, which requires politicians to get police permission for rallies, are unconstitutional. The Public Order Act has been used, among others, against former president Kenneth Kaunda, who is on the come-back trail and wants to contest elections against President Frederick Chiluba and his ruling Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) later this year.
Last Wednesday Parliament’s speaker found the trio guilty of contempt when Miyanda complained about the articles, and referred the matter to the orders committee for sentencing under the National Assembly Powers and Privileges Act, which Misa says originated in colonial times to stop blacks from contesting the utterances of MPs.
The Post said last Friday it had been informed that the committee had already decided on a four-month sentence.
M’membe, Mwape and co-editor Matsautso Phiri are already facing charges of illegally possessing copies of their own newspaper (an edition that had been banned) and under the Official Secrets Act (after The Post revealed what it said was the authorities’ secret plan to push through the country’s disputed new Constitution).