Every week, the HRH Secretariat receives an update on the Mugabe regime’s most recent attacks on Zimbawean media, in other words on the most organised and wide-reaching, regular attempts to exercise the universally acknowledged and agreed human right to freedom of speech and expression. www.humanrightshouse.org will from now on publish extracts of this report. (12-NOV-04) 

The report2 HRH receives is produced by the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe, an independent Harare-based watchdog focussing on the increasing restrictions imposed on Zimbabwean media. This extract covers week 45, i.e. from Monday 1 November to Sunday 7 November.
 
CONTENTS
 
1. GENERAL COMMENT
2. ECONOMIC ISSUES
3. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
 
 
1. General Comment
 
AS this report was being completed an amendment to the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) was forced through Parliament, which now provides for a custodial penalty and/or a fine for journalists practising this so-called “privilege” without a licence from the government-appointed Media and Information Commission.
The original Act (as amended) omitted to provide a penalty for this offence identified in the law.
So instead of repealing this repressive legislation to conform to the SADC principles and guidelines on elections encouraging media diversity and the free flow of information, the government has added to the repressive nature of the law by imposing a completely disproportionate penalty for what, at best, should be a petty administrative matter. This law should not even be on Zimbabwe’s statute books, let alone providing for intimidating custodial penalties for the unreasonably restrictive provisions contained in the Act.
And despite the fact that The Herald (10/11) reported that this latest amendment “sailed” through Parliament, this would not have been the case if government officials had not broken Parliament’s own rules on voting procedures.
 
While The Herald (10/11) briefly and vaguely referred to opposition party objections to the vote as a result of the late arrival of ruling party MPs, The Daily Mirror of the same day gave a more accurate picture to this latest example of the authorities’ disdain for the law – ironically perpetrated under the guise of enacting legislation meant to maintain law and order.
In its story, Pandemonium in Parliament, the Mirror reported that despite regulations barring late arrivals, some ZANU PF MPs who were not in the chamber at the time voting began were allowed in to cast their votes on the amendments after Information Minister Jonathan Moyo threatened parliamentary officials with unspecified action.
However, none of the media questioned whether this latest incident was redolent of a total disregard for democratic principles and the due process of the law by ruling party officials.
 
For instance, none of the media reminded the public of similar incidents in which ruling party MPs suspended parliamentary procedures to ram through unconstitutional laws that clearly should not have a place in the statutes of a country whose government repeatedly claims to be democratic and respectful of the rule of law.
In fact, the authorities’ strident claims that they adhere to the rule of law are further belied by their open defiance of several court orders seeking to protect the rights of individuals, the most recent example being their defiance of an interdict preventing the deportation of the South African trade union delegation (Cosatu) that visited Zimbabwe on a fact-finding mission recently.
The media have not properly examined how these cumulative violations of court orders by government undermine the rule of law in the country.
 
 
2. Economic Issues
 
THE government media’s insincerity in reporting the economic situation in the country was exposed by the manner in which they magnified positive highlights of the Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono’s third quarterly monetary policy review while smothering the sticky issues emanating from his presentation.
The obsession of these media with presenting Gono’s policies as having resuscitated the country’s ailing economy resulted in them censoring his pertinent warnings against fiscal indiscipline, such as unplanned government expenditure.
In addition, they exploited the visit to Zimbabwe by a Chinese government delegation –ostensibly to seek areas of bilateral co-operation – as proof of the economic success story of government’s “Look East Strategy”, meant to explore new export markets in Asia.
 
Symptoms of continued economic decay, illustrated by erratic fuel supplies and a flourishing foreign currency black market, were ignored in an effort to present government economic policies as having steered the country’s economy out of the woods.
Neither did the official media reconcile President Mugabe’s “look-East” policy with Gono’s efforts to court the IMF as part of his economic turnaround strategy.
These issues were only dealt with in the private media. However, like the government media, they also failed to fully report on the recent wave of price increases of most commodities and services amid claims of a drop in the inflation rate to 251,5 percent in September.
 
Nevertheless, the private media’s coverage of Gono’s monetary policy was more professional, as they evaluated his successes against his failures.
For example, while the Zimbabwe Independent (5/11) quoted analysts as conceding that Gono had succeeded in stabilising the inflation rate, bringing a degree of discipline to the financial sector and has been instrumental in slowing the downward spiral of the productive sector, it noted that the RBZ boss had failed to deal decisively with other key economic problems through errors of judgment or inability to come up with effective policies.
Among these, said the Independent, was Gono’s failure to deal effectively with the “exchange rate problem that has hurt exporters and put some of them out of business”, his inability to find a lasting solution to foreign currency shortages and his vulnerability to political manipulation by the ruling ZANU PF.
The paper’s editorial cited government plans to pay unbudgeted gratuities to liberation war collaborators and detainees and compulsorily acquire foreign-owned agro-processing concerns in the Lowveld and Eastern Highlands under the land reform programme as some of the “dangers lurking” in Gono’s efforts to revive the economy.
 
But the government media avoided these issues.
Rather, The Herald (2/11) remained content to gloss over Zimbabwe’s deep-seated economic problems saying, “the tone set by the RBZ chief Dr Gideon Gono in his maiden monetary policy statement of December 2003 has reaped benefits that have seen our economy on the right direction to normalcy”.
Selectively using the fall in inflation, it thus argued, “prices have not been increasing at astronomic levels”.
This selective coverage, meant to portray Gono’s policies as the right tonic for the country’s economic woes, further manifested itself in the way ZTV (01/11, 8pm), Power FM (02/11, 6am), The Herald (2/11), the Chronicle (4/11) and even the privately-owned Financial Gazette (5/11), also failed to ask pertinent questions about the viability of the RBZ’s proposed Zimbabwe Allied Banking Group (ZABG), under which all of the country’s collapsed banks would be amalgamated.
 
The two government dailies observed that the proposed banking group “could arguably be the best thing that has happened to the banking sector”, while ZTV quoted economic analyst Albert Machando contending that, like the South African ABSA bank, ZABG had the potential to become a regional giant that would “also help the nation should the foreign banks decide to sabotage the government”.  
The Financial Gazette (4/11) concurred, saying ZABG “had brought more clarity and removed the uncertainty that had stalked the [banking] industry since upheavals began late last year”.
 
However, Studio 7 (2/11) quoted economist Peter Robinson saying the recapitalisation of collapsed banks at a cost of $2 trillion would cause serious inflationary pressure for the economy.
An unnamed financial writer quoted on SW Radio Africa (7/11) agreed.
Said the writer: “The crisis is that we are going to have a conglomeration of six or seven weak banks moulded into one bank in the hope of creating a stronger one. This doesn’t work. A loose knit conglomeration of small banks that are not strong will also create a bigger bank that does not have a good balance sheet and that cannot be able to survive in a market like ours…”
The Daily Mirror (5/11), the Independent and Standard (7/11) stories raised similar concerns.
Moreover, the Independent (5/11) claimed that Gono had lied to a parliamentary portfolio committee that no bank would collapse, as he had started planning “months ago to form the ZABG by merging collapsed banks”.
 
This drew a vitriolic response from The Sunday Mail (8/10) columnist Lowani Ndlovu.
Ndlovu’s rebuttal of the Independent story was, however, more conspicuous by its personal spiteful insults on the “idiocy” and “kind of stupid conclusion drawn by that newspaper’s dunderheads from what they claimed to be ‘information gleaned from central banks” than for the coherence of his argument.
Earlier, The Herald (6/11) also tried to dismiss the private media’s pertinent criticism of the apparent shortcomings of Gono’s policies by peddling unsubstantiated claims that there was “a sinister campaign to discredit the economic gains scored by Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor Gideon Gono”, which it said was “fuelled by the opposition MDC, its newspapers, some economists and Western countries”.
It then falsely claimed that Gono’s “reforms” had resulted in “constant fuel supplies (and) stabilisation in the foreign currency markets”.
However, The Daily Mirror (4/11) disputed such claims, saying the current fuel shortages created “suspicion that the country’s foreign currency woes are worse than the public has been told”.
Said the paper: “The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has made it clear that given that the country is virtually on its own, the foreign currency allocation priority is fuel and electricity. So, we wonder where the foreign currency allocated to fuel procurement is going”.
If the government media were not reporting glowingly on the purported successes of Gono’s monetary policy, they were parading the signing of eight deals between government and the Chinese as indicative of the positive results brought by the authorities’ “look-East” investment drive (ZTV, 4/11, 8pm, The Herald and Chronicle, 5/11).
In fact, ZBC carried about 52 stories extolling the relations between Zimbabwe and the People´s Republic of China and calling on business people to exploit trade opportunities presented by that country.
The broadcaster even claimed that since Zimbabwe was granted an Approved Destination Status by the People´s Republic of China, it has recorded a 40 percent increase in the arrival of Asian tourists as at June 30 2004. However, the report did not explain what this percentage represented in real figures.
 
 
3. International relations
 
THE four-day visit by a Chinese delegation presented the government-controlled media with the opportunity to spruce up government’s battered international image.
They gave the impression that despite the alleged plot by the imperialist West to turn the world against Zimbabwe, the country still enjoyed support from members of the international community, among them the People´s Republic of China.
And as the week drew to a close, Power FM (6/11, 1pm), Radio Zimbabwe & ZTV (6/11, 8pm) and The Sunday Mail (8/10) added Equatorial Guinea to this list of friends after President Mugabe reportedly got a “hero’s welcome” on arrival at Malabo for his three-day State visit to that tiny West African country.
 
But despite the government media’s calculated efforts to use the People´s Republic of China and Equatorial Guinea’s friendship as a measure of Zimbabwe’s acceptance into the international fold, the private media gave a different picture.
For example, SW Radio Africa (3/11) and The Financial Gazette (4/11) revealed that trouble was actually brewing for the authorities with reports that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), angered by the humiliating deportation of its senior officials, was mobilising civic groups in the region to “seal entry points into Zimbabwe for four days” from December 4 to 8 in a move the Gazette noted could trigger a diplomatic rift between South Africa and Zimbabwe.
In the same bulletin, SW Radio Africa also reported on plans by the Southern African Trade Union Co-ordinating Council (SATUCC), which represents 13 labour bodies in the SADC region, to hold a meeting in South Africa to discuss the COSATU deportation, among other issues.
 
The government media largely ignored these events.
The Sunday Mail for example, only referred to COSATU’s threat to barricade Zimbabwe’s borders as part of its response to the planned protest against government’s poor human rights record.
Without treating the matter fairly, the paper simply slandered the pending COSATU action on the unfounded grounds that the labour body was being coaxed into taking such action by the “British government using Anglo-American interests in the region”.
The paper fingered the new British ambassador to Zimbabwe, Dr Rod Pullen, as working with four sister embassies in Botswana, Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique to “coordinate and make real” COSATU’s plans.
Except for Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, the rest of the story’s sources remained unnamed.     
 
Earlier, The Herald (3/11) attempted to link Pullen to the underground pressure group, Zvakwana, on the absurd basis that a letter he wrote to Social Welfare Minister Paul Mangwana seeking a meeting to discuss support social services programmes arrived “on the same day” as a Zvakwana letter to the minister protesting the deportation of the COSATU officials.
In fact, the government media’s obsession with attacking any criticism levelled against the authorities also resulted in The Herald (1/11) passively allowing its “political commentators” to launch personal attacks against a senior ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) official, Patrick Balopi, for accusing President Mugabe for running down the Zimbabwean economy.
The commentators appeared especially rankled by the fact that BDP executive secretary Botsala Ntuane supported Balopi, saying it was “within his rights” to criticise Mugabe.   
 
Meanwhile, the Independent reported the European Union parliamentarians (MEPs) as having resolved to bar ruling party politburo member Kumbirai Kangai, who is on the list of the 95 associates of President Mugabe banned from travelling to the EU under its targeted sanctions regime, from attending the EU-ACP meeting due to be held in the Netherlands later this month.
The paper quoted the co-spokesman on Foreign Affairs and Human Rights in the European Parliament, Godfrey van Orden, as saying there were making “representations to the Dutch government” that Kangai should not be given a visa as it would be “quite wrong for politicians such as ourselves to sit down in a meeting with a banned individual”.  
But despite such developments, ZTV (5/11, 6pm) still sought to give the impression that Zimbabwe’s international stature was improving as Western powers were beginning to recognise government as legitimate.
Australian Ambassador John Shepherd was reported as having told Vice-President Joseph Msika that his country respected the Zimbabwean government because it was legitimately elected.
Msika was quoted humbling the Australian envoy, accusing his country of working with Britain in “demonising” Zimbabwe.
Ends.
 
The MEDIA UPDATE was produced and circulated by the Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe, 15 Duthie Avenue, Alexandra Park, Harare, Tel/fax: 263 4 703702, E-mail: monitors@mmpz.org.zw
 
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