It is understandable that the independent media should celebrate Jonathan Moyo’s political slide for he epitomised probably the worst form of abuse of power to settle both personal and state scores in recent times.
As a Zimbabwean weekly noted, the information minister ”personalised his crusade against media freedom”.
His litany of media sins notwithstanding, Moyo was operating within a system that allows him the power to treat the media in the way he has done. It’s a system that was carefully crafted by the colonial Rhodesian Front, and cosmetically modified by Zanu-PF in 1980.
Zimbabwe’s Constitution makes no explicit reference to press or media freedom. It only provides, rather economically, for freedom of expression. This freedom is eroded by a lengthy list of qualifications, including interests of ”public morality”, ”public safety”, defence and ”economic interests of the state”.
While in principle there’s nothing wrong with any of these qualifications per se, the same have been invoked to silence a critical press. Since independence, Zimbabwe’s media have had to contend with a situation where an institutional support system for editorial and programming autonomy is non-existent.
I have read articles that suggested a kind of nostalgic yearning for the ”good old days” of the pre-2000 Ministry of Information. But, while not as vicious as Moyo’s office, the yawning bureaucracy President Robert Mugabe disbanded at the launch of the controversial land reform programme cannot be associated with a progressive media policy.
It will perhaps be most remembered for issuing press cards, firing editors from the state media, and running a near-obsolete fleet of Rhodesian-style mobile cinema vans showing ”developmental” films to rural people.
As they rub their palms with glee at Moyo’s slouch to perdition, the media should not entertain the illusion of an automatically happier era in Zimbabwe. It was not out of magnanimity that previous information ministers — Nathan Shamuyarira, Chen Chimutengwende, Witness Mangwende and Victoria Chitepo — harassed or arrested fewer journalists during their terms than those arrested and tortured under Moyo.
The reason is that Zanu-PF was not subjected to the kind of political competition that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change brought. Had any of them assumed the information portfolio in turbulent, post-1999 Zimbabwe, it’s highly likely they would have behaved no differently.
The launch of The Daily News newspaper — which provided a platform for both the opposition and dissenting cliques within the ruling party who were shut out of the public media — raised the stakes in the new ”struggle for Zimbabwe”. With the support of a pliant judiciary and police force, a huge budget and the personal blessing of the president, Zimbabwe’s information and media policy under Moyo became a kind of ”shock and awe”.
In a letter to the Zanu-PF politburo in the aftermath of Tsholotsho, Moyo wrote: ”Today The Daily News is off the streets as a result of violation of laws that we have collectively enacted yet the truth is that some comrades here have conveniently distanced themselves from those laws and now I am personally held liable for the demise of The Daily News.”
What distinguished Moyo from his predecessors was his profound zealotry; otherwise the structures never changed, and will certainly not change simply because he is gone.
Under Moyo the media have taken a tragic battering. In the most difficult circumstances, the media have struggled courageously to narrate the unfolding Zimbabwean story. However, the struggle for media freedom should not end with the fall of Moyo. It is a struggle that preceded him; and a struggle that should challenge authoritarian state institutions, of which Moyo, the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act and Public Order Security Act are sad products.
The media would be naive to believe that their current romance with senior Zanu-PF officials fighting Moyo is more than just a dance. The intra-elite fallout in Zanu-PF can never be expected to deliver media freedom.
Wallace Chuma teaches at the University of Cape Town’s centre for film and media studies