The message travels faster than Sharuko

The message travels faster than Sharuko

08/03/04
I HAD arrived at the Harare International Airport on time to allow myself enough time to check in safely and possibly have breakfast at the upper floor restaurant.

But by the time I boarded the plane it was as if I had arrived there a couple of minutes before the closure of the departure lounge.

As soon as I had handed my passport over to the immigration officer he looked at it as though he was waiting for it. He flapped through the pages and held it on his left hand to look at me straight in the face as a senior military man at a cadet.

"You are a journalist?," he asked me. The answer came out of me with much difficulty because I knew that my passport is silent on my occupation.

"Yes," I said politely and with a quivering voice. As my heart pounded questions began running in my mind.

"What could I have done to deserve this?" Who was this man asking this question? Was he a genuine immigration officer or some intelligence officer, I wondered.

Then hell was let loose! Where was I going. Where was Robson Sharuko!. Were we together in this trip. When was I due back. Who was going to be my contact person in South Africa? Where was my luggage..The man wanted to know just but too much. The questions were as many and disturbing as they were plain daft. I was gobsmacked.

Latter I saw Emerson Mnangagwa passing freely in the company of some young girls whom I suspect were his daughters.

Those behind looked at me as though I was a wanted criminal. I saw them craning their necks forward to see who this person was like primary school children taking a gaze at one of their number being caned by an irascible headmaster.

Those ahead of me didn't want to miss the spectacle either. They probably thought that I was one of those bogus asset management people caught trying to skip the country.

Even though I have seen him before I can't say I know Sharuko for I have never seen his relatives. I don't know where he stays. I first and last spoke to him in 2001 when he was coming from Dubai at the Jo'burg Airport and that. was by accident.

"It is so ridiculous to lump two different people with different hopes, fears and interests together"

MTHULISI MATHUTHU

If there is a view I share with him, I have yet to know it. So why was I being asked about this man?

One consolation took me through the trouble. I was innocent and I was going to attend a public meeting in Johannesburg. Even though I still don't know where Sharuko is I now understand why I was being asked about him.

He had just been fired from the Herald newspaper for filing copy for the Voice of America and was known to be headed for South Africa. Any other journalist hurrying out had to know something about Sharuko's mission and had to share it with the state.

The fear being that such a journalist will take the sad story of Zimbabwe to the outside world. I laughed when the whole picture began working out clearly in my mind. But sadness engulfed me.

More than twenty years into independence, Zimbabwe is still one of those countries that train journalists so it can do anything to them.

So entrenched is the conspiracy theory that even a poor journalist fits into the imaginary conspiracy puzzle. It is so ridiculous to lump two different people with different hopes, fears and interests together.

Blocking a journalist from traveling will certainly not freeze all the computers in Harare and suddenly stop them from transmitting the horrendous message to
as far as Iceland.

Besides, the story is already out. Just before the harassment at the airport the European Union had announced the renewal of travel ban on President Robert Mugabe and his cabal. More recently, the USA did just the same.

For all that to happen it didn't take a journalist to sneak out and seek audience with Colin Powell or Baroness Amos. It simply took brazen trampling of
human rights by men and women masquerading as liberators in Zimbabwe. The message travels faster that Sharuko.

The most dangerous people to Zimbabwe's image abroad are those who are allowed free passage where journalists are undressed for no apparent reason.

They include those who kidnapped Patrick Nabanyama and went on to kill Cain Nkala. They include those who are known to have said people who don't support them will die. Among them are those who are being investigated by the UN for plundering DRC in the name of Pan-Africanism.

With them are the people whom we know to have set up camps to manufacture corpses (to borrow from Maxim Gorky) to crush dissent in Kezi and elsewhere in the 1980's.

Needless to talk about those who bombed the Daily News and went on to close it and crafted laws to narrow the space for free competition and flood out the opposition.

They are known by everybody for their opprobrious activities which are downright crude and senseless. Murder by its very nature is too sensitive a project to be managed by clumsy clowns in Harare.

Above all the world is different from what it was in the early 1980's when "corpse manufacturing" in Kezi could be camouflaged as counter insurgency.

Until this stupid conspiracy theory which justifies evil conduct and harassment of other citizens is "finally and permanently discredited and abandoned" it will be difficult to imagine a good story about this establishment in any credible newspaper.

Ask De Klerk and P.W. Botha.
JOIN THE DEBATE ON THIS ARTICLE ON THE NEWZIMBABWE.COM FORUMS
editor@newzimbabwe.com