Zimbabwe Independent journalists refused accreditation

By Violet Gonda
30 January 2006

All journalists working for the Zimbabwe Independent Newspaper were on Friday denied accreditation by the Tafataona Mahoso-led Media and Information Commission. Sources at the Independent said Mahoso is using a technical argument to target the paper. The issue concerns a story written by the newspaper last year on the resignation of MIC commissioner Jonathan Maphenduka. The MIC is demanding that the weekly paper retract the story it published alleging that the commissioner fell out with Mahoso over the issue of granting the Associated Newspapers Group (ANZ), an operating licence.

A meeting between Mahoso and the newspaper bosses yielded no results on Monday.

A group of journalists from the paper had gone to the MIC offices in Harare to renew their licences but were turned away and told that there was an issue pending before they could get accredited.

The former commissioner, who resigned in August last year in protest, accused the commission of being unprofessional and cited the case of the ANZ saying the manner in which it was denied a licence was undemocratic.

Sources at the Independent newspaper said Mahoso’s latest demands are highly technical and centre on correcting the issue of which office Maphenduka sent his resignation letter to. A journalist at the paper who preferred to remain anonymous said the newspaper is willing to retract the story so that they can get accredited but the problem is “they don’t know what exactly to retract as Mahoso’s arguments are of a technical nature. He seems to be petty and merely concerned with wanting to clear the fact that Maphenduku resigned from the wrong office.”

The Zimbabwe Independent and Standard newspapers, owned by media mogul Trevor Ncube, are the last remaining publications in Zimbabwe that can be called truly independent. Journalists from the Standard were however registered. So far four newspapers have been closed down in three years, after the MIC refused to issue licences to the publications.

The accreditation is renewable every year under draconian media laws which state that journalists must be accredited by the government-appointed commission before they can practise.