As Zimbabwe forges ahead with a crackdown against its alleged critics, a journalist arrested this week just days after writing an article claiming the country’s police chief was unfit for duty, was charged with contravening the Police Act.
The crackdown includes Saturday’s arrest of a white farmer who failed to heed an eviction order and the imprisonment of recently retired judge Fergus Blackie.
State-run ZBC television reported late on Saturday that the arrested journalist, Tawanda Majoni, a former policeman, had ”not properly resigned from the force” before getting a job with the recently-launched Daily Mirror newspaper.
He was arrested on Thursday and released Saturday facing charges of contravening the Police Act, police representative Wayne Bvudzijena told ZBC.
ZBC said investigations were prompted by an article Majoni wrote in the Daily Mail’s first edition alleging that Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri was unhealthy and unfit for duty.
The report was dismissed by Chihuri as untrue and prompted an angry response from Information Minister Jonathan Moyo who said that if the paper’s editor could not run ”a professional paper, the law will have to assist him”.
Under tough press laws introduced this year, publishing false information is punishable by a stiff fine, a prison sentence, or both.
The state-controlled Sunday Mail reported that Majoni is expected to appear before a police hearing.
Meanwhile the shaken looking former High Court Judge Fergus Blackie (65) appeared in court on Saturday as his lawyers appealed for a bail hearing.
Lawyers for Blackie said he spent the night in an overcrowded prison cell. The layers allege that he was denied food, warm clothes, and his blood pressure medication. They dismissed as ”preposterous” charges against Blackie of obstructing justice.
Meanwhile a sugarcane farmer, Theo Engels, was arrested for defying a government order to hand over his land to the government as part of controversial land reform programme, said Jenni Williams, representative for a farmers support group, Justice for Agriculture.
The government has targeted 95% of white-owned farms for seizure and redistribution to blacks. A deadline for the first 2 900 evictions passed August 8, but many farmers ignored it and others were fighting it in court.
Twelve other farmers were arrested earlier this week for defying the government eviction orders and more than 300 other farmers had been charged with defying the order to leave their land.
President Robert Mugabe said he is trying to remedy colonial-era inequalities by redistributing the commercial farms to landless blacks, but many of the biggest farms have gone to his confidantes instead.
Before the seizures began two years ago, 4 500 whites owned a third of Zimbabwe’s farmland, while seven million blacks lived on the rest.
Some of the country’s more independent minded judges have also been accused of working against the state.
Blackie, the former high court judge, had repeatedly clashed with President Robert Mugabe’s government in human rights and corruption cases.
In July, Blackie sentenced Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa to three months in jail on contempt of court charges after the minister repeatedly ignored a court summons.
Chinamasa ignored the ruling and police refused to arrest him in what was seen as further evidence of a breakdown of the rule of law in Zimbabwe.
Critics say the government ignores court rulings it dislikes while using sweeping new security and media laws to crack down on opponents, judges and the free press.
The southern African country has been wracked by more than two years of political and economic turmoil, marked by a violent crackdown against the opposition and government seizures of white-owned farms. – Sapa-AP, Sapa-AFP