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Daily News' demise: was it an inside job?
By
Staff Reporter
THE
Daily News' demise could have been an inside job, according to sensational
claims by some of the company's directors.
It has also emerged that managers at Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ) -- publishers of the banned newspaper -- rowed over the paper's non-registration which directly led to its closure, New Zimbabwe.com can reveal.
Electronic mail exchanges between the paper's senior managers and majority shareholder, Strive Masiyiwa, reveal serious concerns at the decision not to register the paper in line with new legislation passed in May 2002.
The Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (Aippa), which was passed in May 2002, gave media organisations up to December of that year to register with a government appointed commission.
All other papers but The Daily News and its sister paper, The Daily News on Sunday, registered.
The decision not to register led to internal rifts within The Daily News, and the paper's editor Geoffrey Nyarota was unceremoniously dismissed on December 30, 2002, after he openly expressed disquiet with the management's decision to defy the law.
Although The Daily News became an "illegal" newspaper on 1 January 2003, it was only shut down in September 2003 after the Supreme Court ruled the paper was illegally publishing. The Supreme Court said The Daily News had gone to court with "dirty hands", having defied a law which media groups say is repressive.
However, correspondence exchanged from January to September, 2003, between executives, directors and shareholders of ANZ reveals some fatalistic legal advice given to senior managers and an arrogant defiance in areas, which gifted the government with an opportunity to shut down The Daily News.
In an unpublished e-mail, Judith Todd, a former director at ANZ, expresses the view that ANZ chairman Samuel Sipepa Nkomo and former Zimpapers chief executive Matthews Kunaka, drafted in as a director, had a death wish for the company.
In one e-mail, dated January 6, 2003, addressed to Norman Nyazema, the chairman of Masiyiwa's Independent Media Group (IMG), Todd blasted: "The Daily News is one of the few lifelines to sanity we have left. I do not want to be complicit in allowing it to be destroyed."
Todd further reveals growing intolerance to dissent within the management, likening it to Zanu PF. She said: "'The ruling party' and 'the majority shareholders' have a distinctly similar ring and a totally identical purpose: simply to shut out any dissenting views. I do not understand how Sam Nkomo has been able to accrue and wield such power, such destructive power as it turns out, without the knowledge let alone consent of the Board."
Just before Nkomo's appointment, Nyarota had commissioned a series of stories linking him to corruption at the Mining and Industry Pension Fund (MIPF). He had been forced to resign but the case was dropped before plea after his co-accused Trevor Carelse-Juu skipped the country ahead of a police probe.
Stuart Mattinson, one of the ANZ directors who backed the company's decision not to register was tackled by Masiyiwa in September 2003 after the paper's legal challenge collapsed. He insisted that the government would have closed the paper down anyway.
However, he revealed there was internal strife among top managers, and that there was poor or no legal advice at all to help them in dealing with the crisis at the company.
Said Mattinson: "I am most concerned that we appear to have been caught unawares and our response has not been fully considered, indeed it seems that we have left our executive team to decide on strategy, determine a legal position and tactics and at the same time deal with the illegal and thuggish tactics of those who would like to see us permanently closed."
However, Mattinson was unrepentant over the botched court challenge, or the legal faux pas, saying: "Our principled stand is not the cause of our closure, it simply gave our enemies an opportunity to attack us, had this course of action not been available to them, then I have absolutely no doubt that they would have engineered some other 'quasi legal' ruse to close us down."
The latest revelations will add succour to Nyarota's claims that internal bungling, possibly deliberate, had led to The Daily News' closure. The publisher of the Zimbabwe Independent and the Standard, Trevor Ncube, has also voiced similar concerns.
Said Ncube: "I believe that this could all have been avoided had Nkomo agreed to join (then Financial Gazette proprietor Elias) Rusike and myself in our decision to register our newspapers and then launch a constitutional challenge against this Act."
According to Nyarota, ANZ management "gambled on a matter of principle and relied solely on a suicidal battle against a regime notorious for its determination not to uphold the rule of law."
Former Information Minister, Jonathan Moyo, who was one of the drafters of AIPPA claimed in an interview on Afro Sounds FM last Thursday that The Daily News would be in operation if its managers had registered it.
"Without a doubt, the paper would be selling on the streets," Moyo said to questions on the Zimbabwe Today programme. "The Daily News managers had enough time from May 2002 to launch an appeal with the courts before the December deadline but they chose defiance. Even when they were operating illegally from January 2003, we did not close them down and waited for the courts to decide on their fate and that decision came in September 2003."
Moyo, now an Independent MP for Tsholotsho, however insists that the Media and Information Commission is now abusing its position by refusing to grant The Daily News a licence.
Nkomo insists that
Nyarota is bitter, and that he was fired because he was running the
company's finances down. He says no positive or negative action on ANZ's
part would have stopped the government from shutting the paper down.
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