/ 19 July 2005

Zimbabwe: Dreaming of freedom

The Zimbabwean government has again refused to license one of the country’s only independent daily newspapers, which has been banned from publishing for more than two years, the state-owned Herald newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Samuel Sipep Nkoma, chief executive of the company that published the Daily News, said on Tuesday he had not yet received a copy of the decision by the government’s Media and Information Council.

The Herald reported that council chairperson Tafataona Mahoso refused the newspaper’s request on Monday because it employed unlicensed journalists and had attempted a court challenge of the country’s media laws — including provisions for two-year prison term for journalists working without accreditation — without initially submitting to the registration process.

Andrew Moyse of the Zimbabwe Media Monitoring Project said the decision demonstrates the bias of the Media and Information Council.

”It goes to demonstrate the totally arbitrary nature in which the law itself comes down to a biased group of individuals doing the government’s bidding, the absence of real democracy. The idea of freedom of expression simply doesn’t exist in those people’s minds,” said Moyse.

In a recent column in the government-controlled Sunday Mail, Media and Information Council chairperson Mahoso described ”neo-liberal journalists” as ”moral parasites” and said white people were ”not human”.

The ruling Zanu-PF party maintains a monopoly over broadcasting and daily newspapers. Only three major independent weekly papers survive while three others have been shut down. Correspondents for some overseas media, including The Guardian newspaper, have been expelled.

Police shut the Daily News down two years ago, seizing computers and other equipment and detaining journalists, including Nkomo.

In 2001, the newspaper’s presses were blown up in a military-style operation hours after a government minister called the daily ”a threat to national security”.

No one was ever arrested or prosecuted.

The Daily News and Daily News on Sunday kept publishing through contract printers until President Robert Mugabe passed the 2002

Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, subjecting all newspapers and journalists to a stringent licensing system.

The newspaper failed in a 2003 Supreme Court challenge to the Act, which the paper called an infringement of constitutional rights to free speech. A lower court judge who ruled the newspaper was temporarily entitled to publish was forced to flee the country.

Cash-strapped

Meanwhile, in South Africa, the Democratic Alliance has asked Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to clarify whether South Africa will provide a loan to

Zimbabwe.

This follows reports that the government is considering lending $1-billion to its cash-strapped, crisis-stricken northern neighbour.

”I have today written to Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma asking her to clarify whether South Africa will provide a loan to Zimbabwe, and if so, what the conditions are for the granting of such a loan,” said DA spokesperson on Africa Joe Seremane on Tuesday.

South Africans deserved to know whether or not their tax money would be financing the regime of President Robert Mugabe, he said.

”Most members of the international community, including the International Monetary Fund, are moving towards cutting economic ties with Zimbabwe.

”The South African government must therefore be mindful of the fact that the impression will be created that we are propping up an illegitimate regime in Zimbabwe, which has shown its own people no mercy,” he said.

If any financial aid is granted, it should be used towards easing the suffering of ordinary Zimbabweans.

”Unless strict conditions are attached, there is every chance that the money will be used to enrich the Zanu-PF ruling elite, as well as to finance the Mugabe regime’s relentless intimidation and oppression of the Zimbabwean people.”

Seremane said he had asked Dlamini-Zuma, in his letter, to give an assurance that should the government decide to extend a loan to Zimbabwe, certain conditions would be attached.

These should include, among others:

  • that the money was used to purchase basic commodities such as

    fuel and electricity, and clear evidence was provided as proof of purchase;

  • that an immediate and permanent end was put to ”Operation Murambatsvina”; and,

  • that urgent steps were taken to address the plight of the millions of Zimbabweans left homeless by this operation.

Seremane also warned that any money loaned to Zimbabwe ”will have to come from somewhere”.

”It was not budgeted for, which implies that some projects here at home will have to forego their financing in order to finance the loan to Zimbabwe. I have also asked the foreign minister to explain how they will finance the Zimbabwe loan,” he said. – Sapa-AP, Sapa