Newspaper reports on Thursday said Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and Namibian President Sam Nujoma have joined hands to start a new regional newspaper called the ”New Sunday Times” to ”counter the threat from the global media to African values”.
According to the Cape Times, critics have called the project ”stupid”, and said the two leaders should rather devote their resources to feed the poor in their countries.
The newspaper will be sold in Southern African countries from July 1, the Cape Times said, adding that the real aim of the new newspaper is to offer competition to South Africa’s Sunday Times, which has been demonised by the Mugabe government as the ”chief culprit” in publishing ”anti-Zimbabwe stories”.
The New Sunday Times will be published by the state-run Zimbabwe Newspapers Group and Namibia’s New Era Publishing Corporation, a company wholly owned by Nujoma’s government.
But, said the Cape Times, a senior Namibian journalist who did not want to be named described the project as ”doomed from the start” because it lacks credibility.
”The project is unsustainable,” he said.
”I don’t see how readers and advertisers can sustain Mugabe and Nujoma’s propaganda tool. In fact, at the risk of sounding disrespectful, I dismiss the project as wholly stupid.”
The Cape paper said Mugabe’s chief spin doctor, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, and his Namibian counterpart, Nangolo Mbumba, have already signed a memorandum of understanding for the two countries to jointly publish the regional newspaper.