| The best Zimbabwe news site on the world wide web |  |
Interview Part 3: Prof Moyo and Thornycroft
SW Radio Africa's Violet Gonda talks with Professor Jonathan Moyo, Journalist Peta Thornycroft for the programme, Hot Seat:
Broadcast on Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Violet Gonda: Welcome to the Hot Seat teleconference with journalist Peta Thornycroft and former Information Minister Professor Jonathan Moyo. We continue from last week where we discussed the media and the quality of news emerging from Zimbabwe.
It has been said the country has a suffocating media environment which is keeping people ignorant and incapable of making informed decisions. There are many who believe the government controlled press has deliberately hoodwinked Zimbabweans for years. I first asked Peta if Zimbabwe has ever had freedom of the press.
Peta Thornycroft: Well, certainly not since 1965 when blank spaces appeared in the Herald and where the media was extensively formally censored. What we’ve seen certainly since independence, and I joined the state media in 1982, was a creeping self censorship. It started as self censorship and then by the time that Tommy Sithole took over editorship of the Herald in 1983, and he probably did more damage to the press, than any other person.
By that time one already knew that the noble hopes of the Mass Media Trust would represent a free democratic society and would guarantee freedom of speech, that it was gone. And, if one looks back at how the media in Zimbabwe covered, for example, Gukurahundi, it was absolutely shameful. And, at independence, Zimbabwean newspapers actually recruited really skilled people; mostly journalists who’d fled South Africa or fled Rhodesia; and there were some fine people there. But they were all, every one of them, were forced to leave because of their conscience or as soon as their contracts, you know, five year contracts, were up, they quit. So there’s really no tradition of free press/media in Zimbabwe.
Violet: And also now, under AIPPA, the law criminalises the practice of journalism without accreditation and provides for the possibility of a two year jail term for those found guilty. Now, this is a question for Professor Moyo. Do you think this is a proportionate punishment for such a petty administrative offence?
Jonathan Moyo: Well, I think the fact that there is such a law is a reflection of the kind of society that we have been, it’s not something that developed over night. It is a culmination of our twenty year practice, although it was always difficult for journalists, maybe even impossible to practice without accreditation by the then Ministry of Information, Posts and Telecommunications. One of the biggest responsibilities of that Ministry was accrediting journalists. And, as you know from various sources, major developments in Zimbabwe, notably the Gukurahundi was not reported by Zimbabwean journalists at all when there was no AIPPA.
And, AIPPA was an attempt, I must admit a rather bad attempt at trying to regularise what was happening irregularly and what was giving the State a lot of discretion without any rules. You would be denied accreditation but there would be no explanation for it. I believe the worst period for journalism in Zimbabwe was during the ten year extension of the Rhodesian State of Emergency when the security apparatus was deciding on these things without being accountable to anyone and without anyone knowing what rules were being used. In AIPPA’s case we know what the rules are. They continue to be applied selectively and, indeed, in a proper functioning society they would be unnecessary.
Violet: Peta do you agree that the worst period was during the Rhodesian period?
Jonathan: No, I didn’t say Rhodesian...(I meant) the Zimbabwean period, 1980 to 1990, when the Rhodesian State of Emergency was extended by the Zimbabweans.
Violet: Alright and then Peta still, would you agree, since you are a journalist still trying to work in Zimbabwe, covering the Zimbabwean story right now, would you say that things were worse then than now?
Peta: Violet Ian Smith deported or refused to allow at least ninety foreign journalists to work in Rhodesia. The first journalist I saw being evicted, expelled from Zimbabwe was I think it was early 1982. The headlines most made at that time was that Nick Worrall of the Guardian was deported because of what he had written about Gukurahundi, and it was an extremely frightening phase of Zimbabwe but it was confined to one area of the country.
When the MDC was formed in 2000, I got there in 2001 but I had been up and down, I had no doubt that had there been an MDC in Harare in the early ’80’s, Nathan Shamyurira would have dealt with the press; in Harare or in other places where the MDC had; as brutally as the press were dealt with post 2000 really, post 2002 following the Presidential election, when it has been so difficult. So, what I’m saying is that political protest, political opposition to Zanu PF in each phase of that protest, whether it was in the 80s or the 2000s has been really vicious.
I don’t know if I can remember accurately enough. There was then a period after the Unity Accord of relative political submission. People were oppressed enough and the foreign journalists had little really to report on, and, I’m talking from a foreign point of view. And so, it was quite OK for them, there were very few of them getting into any trouble because there was very little going on, like there’s very little going on now.
But, the moment something happens politically, journalists do what journalists do, they try and tell the story, and they got cracked on now and then. Andrew Moyse, the Editor of Parade from 1984-’85 onwards, I mean, you know, what a heroic job he did, and I’m not saying it because I eventually worked for him.
I mean just go back in the record spells it out for anyone who cares to look, it was the only voice in opposition, long before The Independent, long before the Daily Gazette. There was one voice and it was a monthly magazine and that magazine sold out every month. In fact, I can remember seeing the vendors coming and fighting with each other to get enough copies of it. And, go back and look at what he wrote. But it was really difficult for him, and that was before I joined him.
Violet: And what about AIPPA itself? What does that law do to people’s desire to get the truth into the public domain?
Peta: Violet, you know when you stand there in court and you watch Andrew Meldrum being charged and I can’t remember who was charged with him, and you see perfectly respectable journalists being hauled before Magistrates; I mean they haven’t won a case yet, I can’t even remember why they didn’t win it because there have been such a mass of journalists getting into trouble etc. What does it mean? You’d have to ask people on a daily basis. I don’t think of AIPPA; I mean I’ve got used to it. It’s think it’s lousy. I’m worried about being caught; others are worried about being caught, but from time to time. And if there is a rise in Civil Society protests at the moment and we go back onto the streets, we’ve learned to be clever, we’ve learned to avoid detection, we have learnt to keep a low profile, and, there are so few of us. If something actually happens in the streets of Harare or there is some kind of protests, well, I’m sure it will be just as difficult as it was in 2002.
Violet: And, Professor Moyo, there are some who say you created the AIPPA law which has led to people not being able to express themselves freely in Zimbabwe. That Mahoso and company are abusing the legislation is neither here nor there as you created that monster or at least the breeding ground where this monster has been well fed. Now, how would you respond to that?
Jonathan: Well what I would say to those people is that first they should recall that first of all it was not my creation; it was something that was already on the cards when I joined the Government of Zimbabwe. The aspect that can be seen as my creation, and an aspect which I accept fully, is that I was the incumbent Minister of Information and I therefore had to play the leading role in bringing that legislation to Parliament.
But, this is not a Jonathan Moyo law, this is a law that came from the Government of Zimbabwe and was passed by Parliament of Zimbabwe. I don’t think you are going to make any progress in personalising it and if you say ‘this is a Moyo creation’, you may satisfy yourself but you will not move forward because you will fail to understand that there is something deeply institutional and deeply political about this law which is why it is there in the books, well long after my departure.
Even so, I would like to bring what I think is an important consideration to your attention about this law. While I believe that in a society that is functioning as a normal democracy there would really be no need for this; and the evidence for that, as far as I am concerned, is the draft Constitution that was rejected in 2000, which I supported and in which I played a leading role along with others. We clearly had wanted, and we put a clause in the draft Constitution that sought to protect media freedom as a fundamental right. The Zimbabwean Constitution doesn’t do it. It protects freedom of expression. There is, as you have seen for example in other jurisdictions like the United States, a world of difference between freedom of expression as a natural right, which we are grateful to God because we are born with, and freedom of the media where the media is an institution that is socially created and so forth. We need, in a dispensation such as ours that kind of right.
In the absence of
that Violet, and given our experience over the last 20 years, one of
the worst, worst aspects or worst problems really in terms of media
practice and freedom of expression we have experienced is the absence
of rules. That those in power make their rules, or make the rules as
and when they want to in response to particular situations on the basis
of whim. This is what happened during the ten year State of Emergency
in Zimbabwe; the extended Rhodesian State of Emergency. I think it’s
better to have rules. To know what the rules are. To find ways of dealing
with those rules if you find them unacceptable than to be a victim of
a rule-less environment which is dictated by the personal whim of the
Director of Information or the Minister of Information. With all its
defects, I believe one good aspect of AIPPA is that it tells us in black
and white what the rules are. And, you can then use those rules to fight
the system.
One of the reasons, and I heard Peta saying this, and, she is correct,
so far, of all the cases of a criminal kind that have been brought in
the courts in Zimbabwe under AIPPA, the State has not won a single one.
And, that is a significant development in terms of institutionalising
the rule of law, because, at the end of the day, after losing one, two
three and more cases, the Government gets embarrassed and it modifies
its behaviour. And I think that, then, in an environment such as ours,
can be progress.
Violet: Peta, what are your views on what Professor Moyo has just pointed out?
Peta: That I hope, one day, when Zimbabwe becomes a democracy, AIPPA along with POSA and some of the other security laws will be burned on a heap; a celebrations fire; and, we will never need odious laws, odious security laws again. It is undeniable that what the Government of Zimbabwe did was put rules down which nevertheless, rules being put in the hands of tormentors of democracy, would always be abused. We’ve seen registered journalists being arrested, registered photographers; I’m remembering a photographer from Reuters maybe eighteen months ago being arrested and locked up. So, registration is not necessarily a protection for the Press.
They’re out of control; AIPPA gave them control that they would always abuse whether it’s a good law or a bad law. I think it’s a lousy law and I just hope it goes because it gave laws which were unnecessary. There is defamation; unfortunately, there was criminal defamation even prior to AIPPA. Journalists have been deported continuously since independence. And many journalists in the domestic press, I’m really talking about the State press here and we have seen some in sections of the privately owned media from time to time, practice tremendous self censorship because they are scared. And so, in an environment, it doesn’t matter actually whether there is AIPPA or not AIPPA; it is a lousy place to work as a journalist.
And I’m, of course, like many people who knew Jonathan Moyo before he joined the Government of Zimbabwe, when he became, when he was, one of the first and most articulate writers and analysts on the evils of Zanu PF. I think for me, and I’ve said this to him, so it’s not a surprise to him to hear it from me now on your radio, is that knowing what I know about him, and his argument about the Constitution, I still can’t catch it! How somebody who wrote at length and regularly and was arguably the most articulate and regularly published critic of Zanu PF could have joined them. But, actually, I don’t think this advances anything that we are saying now because we are talking about the media in general and we’ve all been through this many times with Jonathan. And, one day, he’s going to tell us fully, when it’s a better climate than it is now, because it’s a horrendous climate at the moment.
Violet: And then also Peta, still on the media, some people have been saying that the independent media has fallen victim to the polarisation of the country by protecting the Opposition and Civic Society from criticism and from any negative publicity. Would you agree with this?
Peta: I
didn’t know enough about the Opposition until just really before
it split into two factions, nor did I know much about Civil Society.
There were too many daily hard news stories going on. We went to the
occasional press conference, we saw them, we saw them being arrested,
we saw them being beaten, killed, etc, we saw that. But I don’t
think any of us really investigated. I think actually in defence, I
think Trevor Ncube of The Independent; owns The Independent;
was the first person to write, voice that critical
voice from the privately owned press.
And then, the story started to come out actually from the foreign press. And, I think, actually following the split in the MDC; one saw some absolutely horrendous reporting. And, if one looks back on that, one can understand why it was horrendous, because there wasn’t a tradition of accountability and you do have newspapers like The Independent, which did try very hard to not be partisan to one faction or the other. But then there were all these little internet publications that I used to, when I saw their stuff, I used to write them and tell them ‘what the hell are you doing? Why are you writing this stuff?’ And, we’ve seen it in other so called privately owned or independent or foreign funded media which has not been responsible. It's got better now; maybe it has got better because the Opposition is just words and not deeds now so maybe that’s why its died. But, it really did show the shallowness of understanding of many in the privately owned media when the MDC split in two and one saw that people, journalists, could not think beyond their personal admiration for one or other person there.
However, during; since the MDC split; and because that’s the nature of journalism, one starts to ask questions; ‘when did it start going wrong’? And, what’s horrendous, for a foreign journalist, is to find that it went wrong long ago, by 2001 they were squabbling with each other over this and that and I think then the domestic press did fail. I think the domestic media did fail and I actually think that was the job for the domestic press and not necessarily for the foreign media, we were interested in other things, other than the MDC.
Violet: Do you agree Professor Moyo?
Jonathan: Yes I agree. And, unfortunately, all this was happening against the background of a poisoned public sphere. One of the tragedies we have is that when the Nigerians gave a gift to Zimbabwe to buy the South African owned press, there was confusion about what that meant. And, what was supposed to be State ownership, and the State is you, me, everyone, all of us, but in our case it became just the Government, and in particular the Zanu PF Government, which then took ownership of the Mass Media Trust and through it Zimpapers, and, as we know, in the electronic media it took ownership of radio and TV.
And, you cannot expect a proper check, or a means for check and balance where the private interests get caught up with the sort of issues that Peta was talking about. You cannot expect that to be corrected if the public media is in the hands of the Government of the day, and this is a position I held even when I was in Government.
I believe that government has no business in owning newspapers; government should in fact not even own radio.
Any government owned media is, by definition, propaganda pamphlet if it’s a newspaper or a propaganda voice if it’s an electronic media. This goes without saying, it is obvious, and yet this is the situation that obtains in Zimbabwe. And, when we made little efforts to get people to appreciate that Zimpapers is actually not a government newspaper, it’s supposed to be a State newspaper owned by a Trust whose beneficiaries are all Zimbabweans; MDC Zimbabweans, Zanu PF Zimbabweans, Ndonga Zimbabweans, Independent Zimbabweans. They are all supposed to be represented by The Zimbabwe Mass Media Trust.
I’ve been very, very surprised, I must tell you that, even when the issue came up in Parliament and we would say this, it had no takers. It came up again last year and there was some debate, again no takers. I even think that there are many grounds for Zimbabweans, through class action and other means to even approach the courts and say why is the Minister of Information appointing Board Members at Zimpapers, because he has no right to do that. Why is the Minister of Information going to direct things at ZBC? In terms of the Broadcast Services Act he has no right to do that. But yet, no one does anything about it and in the meantime everyone wants to give effect to the fiction that Zimpapers is a government owned group, ZBC is government station. And, as long as that continues then we will have problems.
Otherwise, yes, I agree with what Peta said. You know, there are many things which are wrong with Zimbabwe but those many things in many significant ways are a reflection of who we are, therefore a reflection of what is wrong with us. It might be a very easy thing for many or some to say ‘ah, this is what is wrong with Jonathan Moyo’, but if you look at this business, it really has become a growth industry, of intolerance. The institutionalised intolerance in our country to a point where we don’t even want to agree that we were actually created differently. This is a fundamental problem that is arresting not just our development, but the search for a solution to the current crisis in Zimbabwe.
Peta: Jonathan do you think you can have any of those entrenched freedoms of expression and freedom of the media under Zanu PF? It’s impossible.
Jonathan: No, I think you can’t. You can’t have it under Zanu PF. Zanu PF has become a poisoned institution and to move forward we can’t move forward with Zanu PF, there is a lot of baggage, and that is why we must agree with everyone else who says we can’t have these freedoms under the current constitutional dispensation. Zimbabwe needs not only a new leadership, it also needs a new movement, political formation and it needs a new constitution. I’m not sure which one should come first.
Violet: That’s the question that I actually wanted to ask Peta, that is there any way of reviving the media right now or that can only be done after Mugabe?
Peta: You know, The Independent, in particular, does a sterling job, really it does and it won’t cease because Trevor Ncube does or does not have a passport. The problem is if it doesn’t reach a mass audience. But, I also need to say about the mass audience and think a lot of them don’t actually believe what they see on dreadful ZBC and they buy the Herald for sports and for the advertisements. You can see it every day all over the country, and The Chronicle. I think The Independent does, in its field, a good job to a limited audience and its only once a week. The most important thing of course is the mass media, the electronic media; radio and television, in particular radio which has by far the largest reach of any other media and while it remains under the control of Zanu PF – no, nothing can be done.
Jonathan: And I should say there quickly that the public media is definitely a lost cause and I don’t think it has a future in Zimbabwe. We have done enough to destroy it permanently and it’s now a question of a media such as the Independent growing the audience and also becoming more accessible and to be more regular and to have a similar competition. I think the future for the media in Zimbabwe is a responsible private media which will be national. I think that is the direction.
Peta: No, sorry, you can also reform. The public broadcaster, if we go back to public broadcasting, there must be a public broadcaster in Zimbabwe that has a responsibility to all sections of the community but it is in a total and utter moral, intellectual and physical state of collapse. And, I think if there ever is democracy in Zimbabwe it would be one of those projects that one would have to seek outside funding for. Getting people trained properly and getting really good leaders in each section who will be answerable to the public.
Jonathan: Yes but, I was also going to say if you look at the technological trends they do not favour public broadcasting in the sense as we have known it because choice is going to be a bigger and much more widespread factor in broadcasting through cell phones, all these sorts of things. I do not see public broadcasters going into that space but I see the State coming up with regulations to require private broadcasters to carry certain public interest issues and in countries like South Africa and the UK where there is a tradition of the public broadcaster even though in South Africa perhaps a bit shaky in recent years, there is some hope of the public broadcaster transforming along with technological changes. But, in Zimbabwe, where public broadcasting has been basically a disaster, seen as a partisan platform, I don’t think, I certainly am not optimistic about its future.
Violet: Due to unforeseen circumstances we have decided to extend the programme and bring you another edition. The concluding debate will include the citizenship issue which has seen newspaper publisher Trevor Ncube being stripped of his Zimbabwean citizenship.
We also bring you
a follow up on events within Zanu PF since their Goromonzi conference
and discuss the opportunities that in-fighting within the ruling party
has created for opposition groups.
Audio interview can be heard on SW Radio Africa’s Hot Seat programme. Comments and feedback can be emailed to violet@swradioafrica.com
JOIN
THE DEBATE ON THIS ARTICLE ON THE NEWZIMBABWE.COM FORUMS
newsdesk@newzimbabwe.com
All material copyright newzimbabwe.com
Material may be published or reproduced in any form with appropriate credit to this website