Media Alert
25 March 2008

Secret Service bid to gag private weekly, MIC blacklists journalist from being accredited

Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) on 20 March 2008 sought a High court order to bar the private weekly Zimbabwe Independent which was about to disclose details relating to the organisation’s director-general Happyton Bonyongwe.

The ex-parte application was served on the paper and listed the CIO as the applicant and the Zimbabwe Independent as the respondents. Attached to the application was a print-out of the unedited version of the story. The Independent in its edition of 21 March 2008 reported that it was still to establish how it ended up with the CIO before the paper had been published.

According to the paper the annexures to the application appeared to have been routed through the address:admin@zuj.org.zw. In an affidavit supplied by Bonyongwe he said the story was “manifestly and palpably false and malicious and should thus not be published.

Contacted for comment, the Zimbabwe Independent said there were issues that were still being clarified regarding the matter.

Meanwhile, the state-controlled Media and Information Commission has reportedly blacklisted several journalists by asking the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to bar them from being accredited to cover the 29 March 2008 elections.

Hopewell Chin’ono a local freelance journalist was on 11 March 2008 denied accreditation by ZEC on the MIC’s instruction. According to his lawyers the ZEC advised the journalist that he was on the blacklist provided by the MIC.

Chin’ono is duly accredited by the MIC in terms of the repressive Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) as a freelance reporter and his press card is valid for the duration of the year.

In a letter to the ZEC his lawyers argued that it was ‘inescapable that the ZEC was deliberately impeding the full coverage of the election process” through selective accreditation of journalists.

“We have perused all the laws relating to the elections and the media and we have been unable to find in them any provision which allows the MIC to interfere with the supposedly independent functions of the ZEC,’ said the lawyers in their letter to ZEC.

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For any questions, queries or comments, please contact:

Nyasha Nyakunu
Research and Information Officer

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