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Zimbabwe Alert - Daily News closure remains indefinite

15 September, MISA


The Chairperson of Zimbabwe’s Media and Information Commission, Tafataona Mahoso says that the closure of the Daily News is indefinite even if the paper registered with his Commission.

Mahoso told the state owned Sunday Mail newspaper that the registration process involved evaluation of the information submitted on the forms and this can take longer. No time frame was given as to when this might happen.

“Arriving at the doorsteps (MIC) does not mean that they will be registered.
It was them who went to the court to report their crime and not us,” said
Mahoso.

The Daily News legal advisor Gugulethu Moyo told the Zimbabwe chapter of the
Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA-Zimbabwe) that she has submitted
the Daily New’s registration forms with the Media and Information Commission, headed by Mahoso.

The closure of the Daily News has been roundly condemned by media organisations in Zimbabwe and internationally as a blow on press and freedom of expression.

BACKGROUND

The Zimbabwean Government closed the country’s leading and most popular
newspaper, the independent Daily News, on Friday, September 12, 2003.

The ban follows a Supreme Court ruling on Thursday, September 11, 2003, that
the paper was operating illegally. Plainclothes security police, accompanied by about 20 paramilitary police armed with automatic rifles, burst into the newspaper’s offices in central Harare at about 5pm and ordered all staff to leave.

Nqobile Nyathi, the Editor, and Simon Ngena, the production manager, were
arrested and taken to Harare central police station. They were released
later that same day.

The Chairperson the Media and Information Commission, Tafataona Mahoso who instigated the closure said that The Daily News is an outlaw organisation and that he would have been surprised if the police had not taken any action. The Daily News refused to register as required under the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA). Section 66 of AIPPA says that all media houses must register with the MIC.

“If they read the law properly what they should have done was to stop
publishing until they are registered,”

Darlington Majonga, a sub-editor, said. It is the first time that a newspaper in Zimbabwe has been banned since the mid-Sixties, when the former white minority Rhodesian government outlawed a pro-black nationalist newspaper, also called the Daily News.

The modern Daily News’s constant exposure of state lawlessness, corruption and violent repression has been a thorn in the regime’s side since it was founded in 1999. It has been the target of three bombings and has endured the frequent arrest of its editors, journalists and other staff. Many of their staff has been assaulted and the ruling party’s militias regularly burn copies of the paper in public.

Ends
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