Panic as Zimbabwe rocked by media scandal

Panic as Zimbabwe rocked by media scandal

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By Staff Reporter

ZIMBABWEAN government officials and senior intelligence officers are locked in emergency meetings Monday in a bid to contain the fallout from the biggest media scandal to rock the country in 25 years.

Government sources said State Security Minister Didymus Mutasa was expected to meet senior intelligence officers in a bid to limit the damage caused by media reports that Zimbabwe’s state security agency, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), had taken over three private newspapers using billions in taxpayers’ funds. The development further cripples independent critical voices in the country.

“There will be emergency meetings between government officials and the intelligence chiefs to discuss the issue, which has sent shock-waves through government and media circles,” a source said. “There will also be meetings between the management and editors of the three newspapers affected by the scandal.

“This issue has caused great damage to the government’s image and also threatened the survival of the three publications.”

There were inconclusive meetings between government officials and the senior intelligence officers, as well as management and the editors of the media houses concerned, after the story broke in the Zimbabwe Independent, which is owned by SA’s Mail & Guardian proprietor Trevor Ncube.

The Independent reported on Friday that the CIO used billions of public funds to buy major business weekly the Financial Gazette and the two other newspapers under the Mirror Newspaper Group, the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror.

The CIO also tried and failed to buy the closed Tribune newspaper, and is manoeuvring to buy President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu (PF) mouthpiece, The Voice.

It was reported the CIO was behind the closure of the privately owned Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe title, the Daily News and the Daily News on Sunday, and allegedly behind the closure of the Weekly Times earlier this year.

The CIO reportedly copied their strategy of owning newspapers through shell companies or as silent shareholders from Angola, where the intelligence service owns the largest circulating daily.

Mugabe’s government already controls a chain of newspapers under the Zimpapers stable, and enjoys a monopoly of the airwaves.

Over the past five years, the government has intensified media tyranny in tandem with political oppression as part of its political survival strategy.

Dozens of journalists of the independent media have been arrested and foreign correspondents deported. The Independent newspaper named CIO officers deployed to the three newspapers to tighten the intelligence service’s grip on the publications.

The government, the CIO and the newspapers themselves have not disputed the report. The CIO’s action were twidely seen as similar to SA’s information scandal in the late 1970s when apartheid intelligence services set up a newspaper and bought space in the foreign media to defend their policies - Business Day
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