IN the first use of its new media law, Zimbabwe’s government has threatened to prosecute the editor of the country’s only private daily over a story about calls for a presidential election run-off, papers said on Wednesday.
The independent Daily News and state-run Herald said Information Minister Jonathan Moyo had written to Geoff Nyarota, the editor of the Daily News,, asking him to correct ”deliberate falsehoods” or face legal action under the country’s newly enacted media law.
Last week the Daily News reported that the ACP-EU Joint Assembly — which groups deputies from the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of 77 countries and the 15-nation European Union — had passed a resolution at its meeting in South Africa calling for fresh presidential polls in Zimbabwe.
”There is every reason to believe that you knew only too well that the information you continue to publish is in fact false as there is no record to support your claim,” Moyo said in his letter to Nyarota.
He said the article on the ACP-EU resolution was ”entirely based on your fabrication”.
Under the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, signed into law on March 15 by President Robert Mugabe, journalists can be deemed to have abused journalistic privilege by falsifying or fabrication of a story and are liable to two years imprisonment or a fine of 100 000 Zimbabwean dollars ($1 804).
Moyo has asked the paper to correct the story or face legal action.
But Nyarota has refused to retract the story, arguing that it is accurate.
”I would rather go to jail, if it pleases the honourable minister, than be forced by him to publicly correct a story that is 100% correct,” Nyarota said.
”If Moyo genuinely believes he can intimidate the Daily News in this manner then it is patently clear he fails completely to comprehend how much the paper values its independence,” he said.
The Daily News quoted a resolution from the assembly which stated: ”The ACP-EU joint parliamentary assembly calls for new elections to be held within the year under the auspices of the Commonwealth and international community so as to allow all people of Zimbabwe the freedom to elect the president of their choice.”
But the state-owned Herald said only EU members adopted the resolution while the ACP group ”criticised the manner in which a vote on the resolution was conducted”.
In fact the resolution was indeed adopted by the assembly as a whole, in a secret ballot. It was approved by 68 votes to two with three abstentions.
The ACP group had asked at the last minute for there to be two separate votes — one by ACP deputies, the other by EU parliamentarians — but the request was rejected by co-chairwoman Glenys Kinnock.
Zimbabwe’s March 9-11 presidential polls, which extended Mugabe’s 22-year grip on power for a further six years, have been hotly disputed both at home and abroad. – AFP
