FOR a period of an hour on Saturday, this website carried a story under the headline ‘Vice President John Nkomo dies’.
The story was based on information given to us by two Zanu PF officials and a senior civil servant who unfortunately turned out to be sharing a common source. One of the sources we used has previously proved reliable, and was at the time attending the party’s conference in Gweru.
But further checks initiated immediately showed that we had been misled, and the Vice President is alive, although he remains gravely ill.
As soon as we became aware of this fact, we moved quickly to pull this misleading story from the website, and delete it from our servers.
New Zimbabwe.com has been online for nearly 10 years and during this period we have gained a reputation as an authoritative source of news from Zimbabwe.
If ever we fail, we are letting down the people who mean most to us: our readers.
On this occasion, we failed the nation and for that we are terribly sorry. We also wish to apologise unreservedly to Vice President Nkomo and his family, who unfortunately have had to deal with this speculation before.
In the 24-hour news cycle, mistakes like this will occasionally happen. But that is not the standard New Zimbabwe.com demands of itself. Our mission is to tell the truth.
Our readers will be rightly disappointed, but we are doubly determined to regain your trust and continue to be an accurate source for breaking news.
We wish the Vice President a speedy recovery while we strengthen our internal systems to ensure errors like this do not happen in the future.
Our apology is sincere, unreserved and heartfelt.
This episode is now behind us and we hope to continue to serve Zimbabweans honestly and truthfully.
Mduduzi Mathuthu
Editor