Victory for Trevor Ncube

Zimbabwe’s High Court has ruled that the termination of Mail & Guardian publisher Trevor Ncube’s citizenship was ‘unlawful, null and void and of no force or effect” and has ordered the state to pay punitive costs.

In his judgement on Thursday morning, Justice Chinembiri Bhunu also declared Ncube a Zimbabwean citizen by birth.

Ncube applied to the court for redress earlier this month after the Registrar General, Tobalwa Mudede, withdrew his passport and terminated his citizenship.

On Thursday Ncube praised the judgement, saying the court had ‘stopped [Mudede’s] gross abuse of power”.

The ruling made it clear that an estimated one and a half million Zimbabweans whose parents were born outside Zimbabwe, and who lived in fear of being denationalised, no longer had to face abuse from the Registrar General’s office.

‘The attempt to use citizenship as a tool to fight perceived political enemies and to settle personal scores must be condemned in the strongest terms,” Ncube said.

The official pretext for rescinding Ncube’s citizenship was that his father was Zambian, but the move provoked worldwide condemnation as a clear government attempt to rein in Zimbabwe’s besieged independent media.

Ncube owns the Zimbabwe Independent and The Standard, the only Zimbabwean newspapers to remain outside state control.

On Thursday, the Attorney General’s office ‘abandoned” the case after conceding his argument that he was Zimbabwean-born.

Ncube’s lawyer, Sternford Moyo, had argued that the registrar had abused his office by acting without advice from the Attorney General’s office in terminating Ncube’s citizenship, despite a High Court ruling in 2005 ordering his office not to prevent Ncube from holding a passport.

Moyo told the judge in his submissions. ‘It was sinister and unacceptable to attempt to denationalise a Zimbabwean citizen by birth, an appalling incident of abuse of public office.” 

Justice Bhunu noted that Mudede had defied the December ruling.

He added that the dropping of the case ‘wasn’t an act of charity, but capitulation to legal realities”. ‘Having­ fully complied with the orders laid down by Cabinet, he [Ncube] was entitled to automatic renewal of his passport,” the judge said.

He noted that Ncube had gone through unnecessary procedures to renounce his Zambian citizenship in response to ‘spurious reasons” given by the registrar’s office, whose ‘attitude was alarming and does not augur well for the administration of justice”.

He ordered the registrar not to interfere with the applicant’s possession or use of his passport and to renew the passport within seven days of the order being served.

Iden Wetherell, special projects editor of the Independent and Standard, said he was delighted. But he added: ‘Trevor should never have been put through this ordeal by a vindictive state.”

Rashweat Mukundu, director of the Zimbabwean chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa, said the harassment of Ncube had a serious impact on his Zimbabwean publications.

The danger was that such harassment had the effect of inducing self-censorship by publishers, who might fear that any allegations dug up by the authorities could be used against them.