Freedom of expression? Not from within Zim.
The Zimbabwe power-sharing deal that was formed in April this year is fast becoming a farce. Just six months on, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has vowed to boycott further work with the President Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party due to ill-treatment of his senior aide Roy Bennett.
The same could be said for the local media where ‘freedom of expression‘ is a foreign term. Yes, the BBC has recently been allowed back in to report from Zimbabwe so we are able to receive news more easily than before. But local news there is a tightly controlled government outfit which monitors the country’s two newspapers, The Herald and The Chronicle.
Plans to establish a government media watchdog – the Zimbabwe Media Commission – as part of the coalition brought an element of hope for generating fair and authentic local journalism. A privately owned daily paper called NewsDay has been recruiting and interviewing staff and is ready and waiting to start publishing. Sadly, it still can’t quite get going as it requires a licence from the Zimbabwe Media Commission which, conveniently, is yet to be set up.
Voices from Zim’s broadcasting outlets have been similarly stifled. The Minister of Media, Information and Publicity, Webster Shamu recently appointed a number of retired senior military officials to sit on the boards of the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe (BAZ), Zimbabwe Broadcasting Holdings (ZBH) and Zimbabwe Newspapers Group, among others. Again, most suspicious and hardly upholds the envisaged plans to reform Zim’s media, as laid out at the Ministry’s Media Stakeholders Conference in May.
So freedom of expression for local journalists appears to remain stagnant. Fortunately the fighting spirit of Zimbabweans remains lively. Formed by a group of Zim journalists, The Zimbabwean is both a print and online newspaper designed for the 3 million Zimbabweans living in exile. It’s “a voice for the voiceless” with a mission to “do everything the government newspapers in Zimbabwe are not allowed to do!”
Unsurprisingly, The Zimbabwean is outraged by news of the recent military appointments and calls for “the imperative need to transform the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Coorporation into a truly independent public broadcaster.”
“It is extremely disturbing that retired brigadiers and colonels would be seconded in such numbers to civilian regulatory authorities.”
Sadly for the time being, news reported within Zim remains an artificial construct. But thank Google for online media: cyber space is once again proving essential in the fight to help those who have been muted establish a voice within their own country.
Obviously, the situation is far from ideal and is indeed a long way off from democratic journalism as we know it. But for now, at least some news from within Zimbabwe can be relayed by its (exiled) journalists so that some of the truth can be made known.
Some really great points here. Just something else that shows that journalists in ‘the West’ shouldn’t take freedom of expression.
I feel sorry for Tsvangirai as well. He has been duped into maintaing Mugabe’s hold on power.
I think that the recent phenomenon of ‘power sharing’ after the incumbent ruler loses or is discovered rigging elections is very dangerous. It has been seen in Kenya recently too.
Elections must produce clear winners in order to avoid the chaos caused by such deals.
[...] possibly the place you would least expect it, never mind actually benefit from it, similar to the stagnant status of its media [...]
[...] big machine that is the struggle for freedom of expression in Africa. This has been an issue in places like Zimbabwe and other sub-saharan countries for some [...]