In ruling that the Media and Information Commission (MIC) was “improperly constituted” the Administrative Court virtually wrote the obituary of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (Aippa).
If the government insists that this notorious law, whose passage through Parliament was as stormy as some of its provisions were of dubious legality, must continue to be on our statute books, then we can foresee it having to endure humiliation after humiliation as Aippa is successfully challenged in the courts.
Aippa was ostensibly introduced to reform the media in Zimbabwe. Some of its proponents spoke of bringing “sanity” back to journalism, which they presumably believed had gone the way of the economy — to the dogs.
The truth was that these people were and are still obsessed with muzzling the independent media. What they wanted, and still want, is an obsequious media, one which sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil of the government.
Aippa was prepared with such monumental sloppiness that the parliamentary legal committee panned it in memorably sarcastic language.
The MIC, which administers Aippa in the supposed monitoring of the media, has a defective composition, according to the Administrative Court’s ruling. This suggests that the people who drafted this law paid little attention to the awesome clout the MIC would wield in deciding who could and who could not publish a newspaper in this country.
With a stroke of the pen, the MIC, some time last month, decided that the nearly million people who read The Daily News every day were to be denied access to their favourite paper.
One of the reasons cited by the chairman, Tafataona Mahoso, was that the company had on its payroll a journalist with “a criminal” record.
The journalist has long appealed against his conviction, a fact Mahoso admitted he was not aware of.
The court, in its ruling yesterday, referred to the bias of the chairman against Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ). Mahoso is a columnist of the government-owned weekly newspaper, the Sunday Mail. Some of his articles were cited in court as examples of how contemptuous he was of ANZ.
This is no time for recriminations for we believe that God saw how utterly unfair it would be to let such a manifestly flawed piece of legislation deny hundreds of thousands of people access to vital information on which to make intelligent and informed decisions on what their government is doing to their country.
The “improperly constituted” MIC, chaired by a person deemed by the court to be biased against ANZ, doomed its rejection of the application for registration of Associated Newspapers Ltd.
So, for six weeks, neither The Daily News nor The Daily News on Sunday were published. The loss in revenue was enormous and the trauma on the staff just as potentially destructive. And all this on the basis of a decision made by an institution whose malice towards ANZ cannot now be doubted.
The government may feel that for the sake of saving face it must stick with Aippa. Or that its reputation is in such tatters anyway, there is no need to atone for such blunders. But the country and the people are bigger than any government.
The high-handed action against ANZ, the police seizure of its equipment and the virtual “criminalisation” of the work of its staff have all reinforced the government image of a bully, ready to treat with contempt and brutality any institution which dares to challenge the legitimacy of some of its actions against innocent citizens.
What must inspire many citizens is that, despite the allegations of the existence of a “Zanu-PF Bench”, our courts remain committed to justice.
May they remain that way for all time.