The Zimbabwean newspaper staff charged with publishing falsehoods

By Staff reporter

11 February 2010

The staff of the UK based The Zimbabwean newspaper responsible for the local distribution of the paper in Zimbabwe were on Thursday charged under the Criminal Law Codification & Reform Act for publishing falsehoods prejudicial to the State.

Wilf Mbanga, the editor and publisher of The Zimbabwean said the charge follows several visits to the police station by the directors and staff of their new distributor, Adquest. The first took place on January 17 when the directors, Barnabas Madzimure and Fortune Mutandiro, were arrested in Mbare while distributing The Zimbabwean. After answering questions for a couple of hours and producing papers to show that the newspapers had been legally imported they were released without charge.

On Thursday Madzimure and Mutandiro were charged with writing and publishing false statements which were published in the January 10 edition of the newspaper under the headline ‘Mnangagwa plots fight back: talk of new splinter group’.

Mbanga said the statements, which are alleged to be false, related to a meeting held on Christmas day between Emmerson Mnangagwa, Jonathan Moyo, and other senior ZANU PF officials, and indicate that this was reminiscent of the infamous Tsholotsho incident. The editor said the charge is ‘ludicrous,’ and calculated to harass and intimidate the distributors of the newspaper.

Madzimure and Mutandiro denied the charges, and in their warned and cautioned statements stated that they had nothing to do with the distribution of the newspaper of January 10, which was actually distributed by the newspaper’s former distributor, Publications Distributors. They further denied that they had written the article or had anything to do with the editorial content of the newspaper, and advised that the newspaper was produced outside Zimbabwe.

Mbanga also accused the former Minister of Information Jonathan Moyo of being behind the harassment of his staff members, as he had been referred to in the story which gave rise to the charges.

Mbanga said the Tsholotsho MP was clearly aggrieved by the article because within days he had launched several scathing attacks on The Zimbabwean, via ZANU PF websites, and had allegedly made a number of personal threats against him.