Zimbabwe Media Remains Under Siege

The GPA subsequently gave birth to a government of national unity in February last year.

But despite umpteen promises by Tsvangirai that the media would be liberalised, nothing has changed since the wholesale closure of four mainstream independent publications in 2003/2004.  Broadcasting remains a state monopoly.

The GPA had called for the setting up of a new Zimbabwe Media Commission (ZMC)  to licence newspapers and replace the previous one that oversaw the death of mainstream publications including the country's only independent daily, the Daily News, in 2003.

Parliament then proceeded last year to interview prospective nominees to the new ZMC. It recommend a list of 12 nominees to President Mugabe from whom he would pick up the final nine. It took almost six months for Mugabe to decide on the final list of nominees.

The process of finalising the nominees was itself fraught with controversy as a few  names of people who had failed the parliamentary interviews were mysteriously restored while others who had passed were deleted. Sources say Tsvangirai had to agree to such shenanigans otherwise Mugabe would not have finalised the list at all. As a result, Chris Mutsvangwa, a Mugabe loyalist of many years, was brought into the commission despite not having been recommended by Parliament when it forwarded the original list of 12 nominees.

Still another month has passed after the names of the commissioners were finally gazetted and nothing  has been done because there is no budget for the ZMC to begin work and invite applications for new media licences.

And prospective publishers are becoming impatient. Those who remain in limbo include  media mogul, Trevor Ncube, who also owns South Africa's Mail and Guardian, and has since imported a modern printing press into Zimbabwe to launch a new daily publication, Newsday.

Mr Ncube has been ready to launch his publication for close to a year and had recruited the staff required for the project but he cannot proceed without a licence. If he does, he risks having his printing machine seized and computers confiscated as was done with the Daily News in 2003 when it refused to register, arguing that a new law requiring newspapers to be licensed was unconstitutional.

Mugabe's stuffed courts later upheld the law requiring newspapers to register with a government commission as being constitutional.

Also in limbo are the Associated Newspapers Group (ANZ), publishers of the banned Daily News, who want to re-open the publication but cannot do that  without the requisite licence. Before soldiers stormed the offices of the Daily News and ordered it to seize operations in 2003, confiscating computers and other equipment, the newspaper's printing machine had been bombed  and destroyed by suspected government agents. No arrests were ever made in connection with the bombing. The London Sunday Times had launched a successful campaign to fundraise for a new printing press for the Daily News before it was permanently banned.

To make the plight of these publishers worse, there is no sign that the new commissioners in the ZMC are about to begin their work.

While the independent publishers remain strangled, the state owned and dominant media conglomerate, Zimbabwe Newspapers, has been allowed to set up two new publications without any licences.

The situation remains equally bad in broadcasting were control of the airwaves remains a state monopoly and there is no promise of liberalising the airwaves anytime soon.

The failure to democratise the media is seen as a deliberate attempt by Mugabe to keep his screws tightened against any voices of dissent in case fresh elections are called in light of the ever growing threat of the collapse of the unity government.

Media rights activists also berate Tsvangirai for having agreed to maintain a commission to licence the media in the first place.

 "It is still worrying that this commission is a partisan political creation. It is staffed with political appointees who have narrow political mandates to defend the interests of their parties than the public interest," said Dumisani Muleya spokesperson of the Zimbabwe Journalists for Human Rights.

Instead of agreeing to a statutory media commission, media rights activist say Tsvangirai should have advocated a totally liberalised media environment in which newspapers would not be required to have licences to operate.

"The idea of licensing newspapers is the direct  anti-thesis of  the constitutional guarantees on free expression. It's absurd that the MDC would buy into that idea in the first place. We need a truly democratic environment in which anyone with the means to set up a newspaper can do so without statutory sanction".

Some determined media entrepreneurs have nevertheless found means and ways of circumventing these restrictions on the media while waiting for freedom to be restored. 

For instance, Wilf Mbanga (left) set up his Zimbabwean newspaper in London to circulate among the Zimbabweans in the diaspora. He also sends thousands of copies of the newspaper into Zimbabwe weekly, exploiting a loophole in draconian media laws which don't forbid foreign publications from being admitted into Zimbabwe. But copies of Mbanga's Zimbabwean  newspaper are routinely seized and burned by militants from Mugabe's party. 

In 2008, a whole truck carrying copies of the newspaper was seized and burned.

Other entrepreneurs have opted for the safer  online route and outlets like zimonline.co.za, thezimbabwetimes.com and newzimbabwe.com have flourished over the years. Their major Achilles Heel is that they are not accessible to the millions of poor Zimbabweans without access to the web and in constant need of information. 

And the practise of journalism in Zimbabwe remains wooefully dangerous with a recent report stating that Zimbabwe has the highest number of exiled journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Zimbabwe among the top five offenders of media freedom.

As South African President  Jacob Zuma lands in Harare this week to try and help rescue the coalition government from collapse, many prospective publishers are hoping he can coax the coalition partners into finally allowing media freedom in Zimbabwe.