Abstract
Reporting from Zimbabwe is a dangerous business.
But, if the state is to be believed, that’s precisely what the young editor of the Sunday Mail is: at the time of going to press, he’s been charged with “attempting to commit an act of insurgency, banditry, sabotage or terrorism”. The Zanu-PF government claims he favours verbal bombs and is the mastermind behind the mysterious Facebook page Baba Jukwa, which offers startling insights into the machinations of Zanu-PF.
To understand how a blogger can get so far up politicians’ noses, you must understand just how limited access to information is under Zimbabwe’s draconian press legislation. It is a criminal offence to insult President Robert Mugabe or the country’s powerful security operatives. A constitutional court challenge to the insult law by civil society groups was successful. However, this ruling has been appealed and, while that process is under way, the government continues to use the insult laws. If Kudzayi is convicted of the offences with which he’s been charged he faces life behind bars.
So when Baba Jukwa was born, so to speak, in early 2013, it sparked an information revolution. Within weeks of establishing his Facebook blog it had about 200,000 “likes”. By July, the figure was nearly 500,000. (That’s far more than Mugabe has, incidentally.) Soon after Baba Jukwa’s emergence, the South African daily newspaper Business Day reported: “Baba Jukwa’s name is whispered in buses, bars and on street corners by Zimbabweans eager for the inside scoop on President Robert Mugabe’s ruling party. One avid follower even climbs a tree in a rural village, awaiting a signal to call a friend for the latest tidbits from the mysterious yet stupendously popular blogger.” Baba Jukwa – the name means “Jukwa’s father” in the Shona language which is widely spoken across Zimbabwe – appeared in the months leading up to the country’s 2013 national elections and, claiming to be a disgruntled Zanu-PF member, told tales of corruption and ineptitude within the governing party. He signs off each post with “Asijiki”, another Shona term which means “We do not retreat”.
And certainly, Baba Jukwa – if indeed he is a single person, for the posts are written in vastly varying styles despite that standard sign-off – doesn’t seem the retreating sort. When state-run media reported that Mugabe had traveled to Singapore for an eye check-up, Baba Jukwa responded by stating baldly that the 90-year-old statesman had once again travelled to the East for chemotherapy. It is widely believed within Zimbabwe and outside its borders that Mugabe is suffering from prostate cancer.
The Sunday Mail’s offices were raided on a Thursday morning in June and Kudzayi was taken into custody. Zanu-PF ministers insist he is Baba Jukwa, though they are equally adamant that he hasn’t been working alone. Baba Jukwa fell silent in the days following Kudzayi’s arrest. On 22 June he wrote: “Good morning Zimbabwe. Please say a short simple prayer to God in your own mother tongue, so our nation can be blessed, and there can be more exposures of evils and all hidden treacheries, we are now almost there now, just one small step left! Asijiki! Ndatenda [thank you] – Baba Jukwa.”
ABOVE: A prison warden checks the documents of Sunday Mail editor Edmund Kudzayi, before releasing him from the Harare Magistrates Court after he was granted bail on July 4, 2014
Credit: Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters
On 3 July, the same day that Kudzayi was released on bail, Baba Jukwa wrote: “Cde Edmund has done nothing wrong please acquit him and let him serve the nation Asijiki! Ndatenda. Baba Jukwa.”
The history of state media is that it is weak and timid, sings praise for Zanu-PF, and only reports on the president’s trips and government policies
Suggest to Zimbabwean journalists, though, that Kudzayi is the victim of a witch-hunt, and you begin to understand that there are far more complex dynamics at play. A senior Zimbabwean journalist based in South Africa – who, like all the reporters interviewed for this piece asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons – explains: “It’s actually Zanu-PF’s factional battle playing out through the media. Zanu has three factions, all jostling to succeed Mugabe,” she says. The governing party’s electoral congress is set for December 2014, and Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since it gained independence from Britain in 1980, seems finally poised to retire. His rhetoric remains as fiery as ever, but his ailing health has opened the door for factions within the party to put their own candidates forward – and to use the country’s newspapers to further their own ambitions. The senior journalist continues: “One faction is led by Vice President Joyce Mujuru, another by Justice Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa and the third by the military generals. All deny the existence of these factions, but these are well-known facts.
“Information Minister Jonathan Moyo belongs to the military camp. He’s not keen on Mujuru succeeding Mugabe. Since his reappointment as information minister, he is accused by the Mujuru faction of attempting to weaken it by fighting through the media.”
Moyo – who did not respond to requests for comment on this piece – is an intriguing figure. He’s the architect of some of Zimbabwe’s most restrictive press laws and so publicly reviled by Mugabe that the president in early 2014 referred to him as “a weevil, a fool and a devil incarnate”. Moyo served as Zanu-PF’s information minister first from 2000 to 2005, during a wave of crackdowns on media freedom, and was then expelled from the party after refusing to reserve a seat in his native Tsholotsho district for a woman candidate as decreed by Zanu-PF. Instead he ran for the seat himself as an independent candidate and won it. He served as an independent until 2009, when he returned to Zanu-PF, and took up his old cabinet position again last year.
The senior journalist goes on: “Moyo made surprise appointments to the Sunday Mail and Chronicle newspapers that fall under the Zimpapers stable. Zimpapers is state-owned and all the papers in its stable are state-controlled. The two surprises relate to Edmund Kudzayi and Mduduzi Mathuthu as editors of Sunday Mail and Chronicle. It was a surprise because Kudzayi once ran an anti-Zanu-PF news website out of the UK, where he lived, and Mathuthu ran an equally anti-government news website, www.NewZimbabwe.com.
Moyo also made appointments at a more junior level of people who have been considered to be anti-establishment.
With these appointments, the tone of state-owned newspapers “changed”, the journalist explains. “They broke a series of huge stories on corruption now commonly known as ‘salarygate’ in Zimbabwe. They exposed how CEOs at government parastatals were earning obscene salaries, presiding over non-functional decaying entities.”
It was a case of a docile, large dog that’s always wagged its tail no matter how hard its master beats it suddenly sinking its teeth into a raised hand.
“The history of state media is that it is weak and timid, sings praise for Zanu-PF, and only reports on the president’s trips and government policies only,” the journalist says. But there was a worm at the heart of the apple.
“The stories only exposed allies of Mujuru or those ministers who are aligned to her and who oversee these parastatals. Mujuru then complained in various briefings to Mugabe and her team put together dossiers they gave to the president. She complained that the reports in the same government media were only serving to destroy Zanu-PF from within – anger about the decaying economy was being directed at the party by ordinary people,” the journalist said.
The Zimbabwean bureau of the South Africa-based Mail & Guardian reported that the media was discussed at a Zanu-PF politburo meeting on 4 June. The politburo is the party’s highest decision-making body: the paper reported that Moyo was “attacked” by his colleagues for appointing Kudayi and Mathuthu and effectively ordered to sack them. He was also “openly accused” of using the media to stage factional fights.
It was Moyo’s refusal to fire Kudzayi that saw Mugabe use his platform at a funeral to verbally attack his own information minister. Moyo subsequently apologised during a meeting with the president and kept his job. Days later, Kudzayi and Mathuthu’s homes were broken into and the former was arrested.
I understand that Kudzayi has been under watch by intelligence on the instigation of the Mujuru faction.
The Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) is hugely worried about the situation in Zimbabwe. The committee’s Africa programme coordinator, Sue Valentine, says that Kudzayi’s arrest and the “extremely harsh charges” he faces are likely to have a “chilling effect on all journalists” – and, of course, deny Zimbabweans of their right to information. Asked to put Index on Censorship in touch with some reporters who might be willing to speak on strict condition of anonymity, the senior journalist replied that this would be difficult – “there is always unwillingness because the environment is altogether rather poisoned”.
Journalists who do not wish to end up behind bars or find themselves under scrutiny by Zimbabwe’s security forces must put their heads down
The reality, of course, is that whatever factional battles are being played out in news pages and on newspaper’s websites, journalists who do not wish to end up behind bars or find themselves under scrutiny by Zimbabwe’s notorious security forces must simply put their heads down and continue to work. A 30-year-old reporter who contributes to several publications inside and outside Zimbabwe under pseudonyms, explains that the desire for anonymity is two-fold. He worked as a teacher for some years because a dearth of publications, particularly those not owned by the state, meant there were very few jobs for reporters. After six years in the industry, he says, the money hasn’t improved at all. His pseudonym also gives him the space he needs to “write exposes about government operations – by not using your real name, you stay safe”.
How safe is debatable. He is almost flippant about being threatened in the line of duty, both in person and via emails. He’s also been followed, he says – a bid, he believes, to send the message that “we’re watching you”.
It has become a minefield for journalists and editors to do their work impartially without being viewed as being in the “camp” of a politician
Kudzayi’s arrest concerns him on one level: “The editor is meant to be the last line of defence for a publication but if the editor is harassed it means the journalist on the ground is worse off because normally editors have security personnel at their homes.” But, he continues, “I’m not frightened.” He reads Kudzayi’s arrest precisely as his colleague and the CPJ’s Valentine do: factionalism springing from Zanu-PF’s politburo meetings on to the pages of newspapers and then into life on the streets of Zimbabwe.
Teldah Mawarire, the Mail & Guardian’s Zimbabwean editor, says there’s plenty to worry about. “The environment becomes more difficult for journalists to navigate because in addition to the existing repressive laws, journalists now also have to navigate around factions and find ways to steer clear of these political agendas being pushed from the top. It has become a minefield for journalists and editors to do their work impartially without being viewed as being in the ‘camp’ of one politician or the other. It’s also very unhealthy to have that (unstated but very obvious) policy that journalists who have been employed in the private media must never be appointed to public media positions. The harassment of the editors has also brought to light the issue that has been raised for a long time now – Zanu-PF as a political party must not be dictating to the public media what to do and who to cover. The public media is not a mouthpiece for the party so the party’s politburo must not be discussing the firing of editors. That is inconsistent with democratic norms.”
Despite the low salary, the harassment and the climate of fear in which Zimbabwean journalists operate, the young reporter remains remarkably upbeat. Baba Jukwa is just one example of the spirit of invention which he sees emerging in the country’s guarded media landscape. “Everyone is a publisher now – Facebook and Twitter have become sources of information and there are more online newspapers, as well as new players in the newspaper industry like the Zimbabwe Mail and the reopened Daily News,” he says.
“I love journalism. I would never leave the profession or trade it for anything.”
Asijiki, indeed.
