In an astounding political volte-face, some of Zimbabwe’s former freedom fighters have eagerly assumed the mantle of their former oppressor, The Rhodesian Front, and now shackle the citizens of the free and sovereign Zimbabwe by the very method of the first oppressor.
The law and spirit of repression that were the seal of the morally repugnant Rhodesian Front of Ian Smith have resurfaced in Zimbabwe under the seal of the Zanu-PF government of this day.
Five weeks ago the Zanu-PF government shut down the nation’s most popular daily newspaper, The Daily News, by way of a legal instrument that compelled all newspaper publishers to register with a state-appointed regulatory authority before they were legally entitled to publish newspapers.
In a court affidavit deposed to on January 27 this year, the Zimbabwean Minister of State for Information and Publicity, Jonathan Moyo, said in defence of the government’s position: “This publication presents clear testimony to the threat Zimbabwe’s sovereignty faces. Government is obliged to defend itself from this subversion. Necessarily there is an obligation on the part of government to weed out subversion whenever it masquerades in our midst as free press.”
The minister’s statements bear a chilling resemblance to those made by Rhodesian Front law and order minister Desmond Lardner-Burke in 1964, when he proclaimed the then most popular African daily — ironically also titled The Daily News — a prohibited publication in terms of the Rhodesian Law and Order Maintenance Act.
According to Lardner-Burke, the ban was necessitated by the fact that the Rhodesian government could not “permit the much-prized ideal of press freedom to be used for spreading subversion”.
In the months preceding the ban of the popular daily, the Rhodesian Front government had displayed the kind of unbridled hostility towards a free press that is displayed by the Zanu-PF government today. It attempted to introduce stringent legal controls on the media, varying from compulsory licensing of newspaper publishers, editors and journalists to a government-controlled press council with wide powers to intervene in the activities of the press.
Journalists working in Rhodesia were frequently harassed by the state, arrested, detained and charged with contraventions of draconian national security laws.
The treatment of foreign journalists by the Rhodesian Front finds alarming parallels in the actions of the Zanu-PF government. In Rhodesia, most foreign journalists were denied work permits. Of the few who were briefly allowed to remain working in the country, at least two were eventually deported after being acquitted of criminal offences against the state.
Similarly, in today’s Zimbabwe, foreign journalist Andrew Meldrum was deported from Zimbabwe after he had been acquitted, months before, on a criminal charge relating to his journalistic practice. All other foreign journalists have been denied permits to work in Zimbabwe.
Government attacks on the private press are frequent. The latest attack came only 10 days ago, when Jonathan Moyo described two weekly publications as “running dogs of imperialism”. This attack was accompanied by a further warning in the wake of the closure of The Daily News that these newspapers would be “next”.
More than 50 local journalists await prosecution on a number of journalistic offences ranging from engaging in conduct likely to cause alarm and despondency to offences such as publishing stories that “denigrate the authority of the president” or the “uniformed forces”.
Predictably, similar offences also existed in the Rhodesian days. They were removed from the statute books of independent Zimbabwe at the insistence of our liberation heroes, who had found them to be so morally repugnant that they had been willing to take up arms and risk life and limb to secure the freedom of the Zimbabwean people.
Two decades later the same liberation war heroes have been returned the laws now cloaked in Zimbawean titles such as the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act and the Public Order and Security Act of 2002.
The Zimbabwean government would have its people believe that “white people” or the British are the sole cause of Zimbabwe’s problems. “Remove them from the scene and the root cause of our problems is abolished forever.”
This is not the truth, of course. The more likely truth is that tyranny, of the kind that Zanu-PF displays now, is the sole cause of humankind’s problems.
Gugulethu Moyo is the legal adviser to The Daily News