Mudede fiasco shows extent of lawsness

Mudede fiasco shows extent of lawlessness

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By Mary Revesai

YOU know you live in a weird country when hearing a colleague announce, “Ncube is a citizen again!” causes you to jump about like a kid although you have always known the person said to have regained this status as a full-fledged fellow Zimbabwean.

But I reacted with that spontaneous excitement and joy when the news began filtering through last Thursday afternoon that reason had finally prevailed and Registrar-General Tobaiwa Mudede who had waged a personal and unprofessional vendetta against newspaper publisher, Trevor Ncube, since 2005, had been stopped in his tracks.

I am not related to Ncube and I have never even met him but like most Zimbabweans, I was appalled by the blatant abuse of power by Mudede in his irrational and illegal attempt to strip Ncube of his Zimbabwean citizenship.

Mudede’s lame excuse for wasting time and resources pursuing a personal vendetta against an innocent and law-abiding citizen was that Ncube had forfeited his Zimbabwean citizenship upon failure to renounce Zambian citizenship which he had never held. The real reason, however, was apparently because Mudede, who was once cited in a story about a scandal investigated by one of Ncube’s publications, harboured a grudge and wanted to get even.

Apologists and bootlickers in the Mugabe-regime often bristle with righteous indignation when the issue of lawlessness and anarchy within Zimbabwe is raised. But Mudede’s machinations are a good example of how government officials who are supposed to interpret and enforce various laws even-handedly for the benefit of all citizens take liberties to invoke these statutes to settle scores against targeted individuals. It is extremely disturbing that as demonstrated by Mudede’s doggedness in knowingly pursuing a matter that had no legal or constitutional basis for almost three years, government officials literally get way with murder when they become a law unto themselves.

In his landmark judgment ordering Mudede to immediately restore Ncube’s citizenship, High Court judge, Justice Chinembiri Bhunu remarked that the registrar-general’s conduct was ‘alarming’ and showed contempt for rulings the judge had made previously after attempts had been made to seize Ncube’s passport in 2005. This flagrant disregard for court rulings coupled with the selective interpretation and enforcement of laws continue to get out of hand because the head of state is too pre-occupied with his own fight to cling to power to properly oversee the running of government.

The mind boggles to imagine how many other chefs are waging personal vendettas against individuals by misinterpreting and selectively enforcing regulations and are being left to their own devices because it is politically expedient to allow them to victimise those perceived to be enemies of the state.

It is common knowledge that the ultimate aim of the long arm of the ‘law’ in this subterfuge was to snatch Ncube’s two newspapers, The Zimbabwe Independent and The Standard from the media landscape. This explains why this disgraceful episode, which should have been stopped much earlier if there were proper checks and balances in the way governmental affairs are conducted, has persisted until now.

Mugabe’s spokesman, George Charamba, who former spin doctor Jonathan Moyo has described as the “useful idiot” because of his penchant for making careless and pompous disclosures prematurely, boasted in a recent installment of his Nathaniel Manheru column in The Herald that 2007 was the year for closing newspapers. It is therefore not farfetched to conclude that Mudede’s shenanigans could have been part of a larger scheme all along. Even if Mudede was acting vindictively alone in the Ncube case initially, it is obvious there were those who were more than willing to be accomplices to the crime because of their own ulterior motives.

The argument by state counsels that Mudede and the Minister of Home Affairs, who was the second responded in the matter, should be exempted from paying court costs because they had made “a genuine error at law” should be a cause for concern for all Zimbabweans. It was revealed in court that Mudede proceeded with his moves to deprive Ncube of his citizenship without seeking legal advice from the attorney-general’s office. In his single-minded determination to achieve his unconstitutional goal, Mudede did not even bother to establish whether Ncube indeed held Zambian citizenship.

This lack of care and dereliction of duty on a matter of such fundamental importance to a citizen shows that in anarchic Zimbabwe, anything goes. It is frightening to think that if a chef gets up on the wrong side of his bed and decides through the auspices of his office to fix someone, the victim becomes a sitting duck. Mudede persisted with his personalised war against Ncube despite having been advised of its illegality when he tried to seize the newspaper tycoon’s passport in 2005. So much for making “a genuine error at law”!

In any other country, Justice Bhunu’s ruling that the attempt to strip Ncube of his birthright was “unlawful, illegal, null and void” would represent an emphatic victory for fair play and an assurance that such a travesty of justice would not be perpetrated against another innocent and law-abiding citizen again. But the Mugabe regime will stop at nothing in its bid to crush dissent as evidenced by the escalating assault on media plurality and freedom. The Mudede fiasco shows that if invoking the Access to Information and Protection or Privacy Act (AIPPA) fails to achieve a particular vindictive objective, an abuser of power within the establishment can always dream up some flimsy pretext to pounce on someone.

Ncube’s legal counsel, Sternford Moyo, described in court how his client had been subjected to “an unnecessary, unlawful and bureaucratic attempt to denationalise him”. He had devoted considerable amounts of money, time and energy to challenging Mudede’s attempt to personalise the law for vindictive reasons!

The mind boggles to think how many Zimbabweans fall victim to fishing expeditions like Mudede’s, either because they are not well versed with their constitutional rights or do not have the resources to mount a long, exhausting and costly legal challenge such as the one Ncube was compelled to resort to.

Mary Revesai is a New Zimbabwe.com columnist and writes from Harare. Her column will appear here every Tuesday

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