Zimbabwe police on Friday brought in for questioning an editor and two executives from two leading independent media houses, newspaper officials and a police spokesperson said.
Hama Saburi, editor of financial weekly the Financial Gazette, said he and the newspaper’s chief executive were on their way to a police station for apparently violating government price controls.
”The police came in and said they need to talk to us about our business, so we are now on our way to the police station. I understand it is all about the newspaper price,” Saburi told Reuters by telephone.
Staff at the privately owned weekly, the Zimbabwe Independent, said its chief executive had also been taken in.
”They came in during our diary meeting and took the chief executive officer. Our editor was in that meeting, but he wasn’t picked up. Only the CEO went,” said one of the newspaper’s employees, who asked not to be named.
Publishers of the two weeklies this week increased their newspaper prices from Z$250 000 to Z$600 000 ($2 at the official rate but 50 cents on the black market).
The prices had been frozen at Z$55 000 since June when President Robert Mugabe’s government announced price controls to try to tame rampant inflation.
A National Prices and Incomes Commission was established to approve price increases for all goods and services.
Analysts say the price controls backfired by deepening shortages of basic foodstuffs, while long queues for newspapers formed as media houses reduced the number of copies printed to avoid losses.
A police spokesperson said the newspaper executives were not arrested and he would not say if they would be questioned about price controls. ”But there are issues that we want them to clarify,” he said.
Mugabe’s government has been accused of stifling media freedom after the country’s largest private newspaper, the Daily News, was forced to close in 2003 for failing to register with a state media commission.
Critics blame Mugabe’s policies — such as the seizure of white-owned farms to resettle black Zimbabweans with little farming experience — for an economic crisis that has seen Zimbabwe’s inflation reach 7 900%, the highest in the world.
Mugabe (83) and in power since independence from Britain in 1980, denies mismanaging the economy and accusations of human rights abuses. – Reuters