In for the long haul

“We are here to bury the honourable Robert Mugabe.”

These words, uttered by a speaker at the funeral of a deceased senior Zanu-PF figure, were to be published Zimbabwe’s Daily News last Saturday, but never saw the light of day.

The man being buried was, in fact, former deputy minister of public construction and national housing Robert Marera. The relative making the speech quickly realized his faux pas and corrected himself.

But it was enough for an alert Daily News journalist to pick up as a interesting angle for a piece for the Saturday edition. Leading the edition was a story about how Ministry of Energy officials were abusing their position to profit from the country’s fuel crisis.

In The Daily News on Sunday was to be a story about growing Southern African Development Community concern over Zimbabwe. These stories were carted off in computers seized by the Zimbabwean police.

Daily News editor Nqobile Nyathi said while the lead was hard-hitting, the rest of the paper would have been a relaxed weekend read.

The Sunday paper, however, was to be a hard-hitting one. According to The Daily News on Sunday editor Bill Saidi, the newspaper would have given the country’s draconian press laws a kick in the teeth.

The newspaper would have carried an editorial condemning Zimbabwe’s Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act as “draconian and unconstitutional”, said Saidi, the author of the editorial comment. The Daily News failed to publish the edition because police sealed off their offices and impounded computers. Efforts to publish the edition using facilities at other newspapers failed.

Legal experts and media practitioners in Zimbabwe were convinced that the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ) was in for a “long haul” in its bid to get the papers back on the streets.

Its efforts to obtain publishing licences through the courts for The Daily News and The Daily News on Sunday would take much longer than anticipated said legal experts.

“We know its going to be a long haul, but management has told us that they are prepared to pay our salaries for the next two years, if it is going to take that long in the courts,” said a senior journalist at the newspaper.

But even if ANZ was to move mountains and manage to get the administrative court to make a ruling on the MIC action, it would still be a “long haul” before the two papers are back on the streets because the matter might remain entangled in the courts, government sources said.

On Monday police invaded the newspapers’ offices in central Harare for the second time and pounced on 127 computers, ostensibly to “access the company’s financial documents”.

This time they were more courteous; enough to obtain a court order before entering. “It’s like a graveyard here,” said a Daily News reporter. “Although we have the desks, there are no computers and we are not doing any work. We just come here to chat and mingle.”

Additional reporting by Mail & Guardian reporters.