The Zimbabwe High Court has given former information minister Jonathan Moyo a 12-day reprieve to vacate a government house following his dismissal last month, his lawyer said on Wednesday.
”He has been given up to March 14 to vacate,” lawyer Johannes Tomana said. ”We are happy, though it’s less than what we had asked for.
”We had asked for a month or three for him to vacate … in fact, he was initially told he had up to three months to leave the house. The judge had to strike a balance, so he has granted him up to March 14.”
Moyo, who was about to be thrown out of the government house in the plush Harare suburb of Gunhill on Sunday, filed an urgent application in court late on Tuesday for an order to stop his immediate eviction.
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe dismissed Moyo, the architect of the country’s tough media laws, on February 19 following his decision to register as an independent candidate for the country’s parliamentary elections on March 31, and said Moyo would have to give up all perks immediately.
But Moyo’s lawyers argued that he had not been given a notice period of three months to vacate the house.
According to the state-owned Herald newspaper, the government line was that Moyo ”did not have a lease agreement to warrant him to be given three months’ notice to leave the property”.
Zimbabwe’s ruling party barred Moyo from contesting in the March 31 parliamentary elections as a candidate from the western Tsholotsho constituency after he attended an unsanctioned meeting that allegedly went against Mugabe’s directive for party leaders to nominate a woman as one of the two vice-presidents.
Moyo (48) was then sacked. His dismissal capped a nearly six-year meteoric rise for the former academic, who went from being one of Mugabe’s harshest critics to his loudest cheerleader.
Moyo made his mark as the architect of the draconian Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, passed into law in 2002, barring foreign journalists from working in Zimbabwe for long periods and tightening controls on domestic media.
Four independent newspapers have been shut down and several journalists arrested under the law framed ahead of a parliamentary election in 2000 that the opposition and many foreign observers charge was marred by fraud.
His argument for the tough media law was that it was necessary to protect Zimbabwe from foreign journalists whom he viewed as pawns of Western countries such as Britain and the United States, which have harshly criticised the Mugabe regime. — Sapa-AFP