The great power that the media possesses to influence society has been noted many times before. But what more of a stark reminder of this in Zimbabwe than the recent news that seven local journalists have been added to the European Union (EU) list of sanctioned individuals and companies from our faltering nation.

Rubbing shoulders with prominent personalities such as staunchly pro-government commentators, ministers and their prosperous families, are veteran Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) broadcasters such as chief correspondent, Reuben Barwe, and diplomatic correspondent, Judith Makwanya. From the pro-government print media, names such as Pikirayi Deketeke and Caesar Zvayi (editor and senior assistant editor of The Herald, respectively) also appear on the list of black-listed Zimbabweans.

The journalists have been reportedly added to the ever-growing list for their contribution to the suppression of free expression and political will in volatile and politically polarised Zimbabwe.  Even Jongwe Printers, the ZANU-PF-owned printing company that produces the ruling party’s publication, The Voice, has been added to the sanctions list.

Now if that does not illustrate the seriousness with which some parts of the world are taking the suppression of democratic processes in Zimbabwe, then little else will. For these acts of retracted hospitality emphasise the important role that the media have in promoting diversity and respect for all views and opinions within a healthy functioning society. Failing to fulfil these, practitioners within the profession must expect to be treated like the criminals they are for robbing the masses of correct, complete and unbiased information.

There really is nothing more infuriating than knowing that those who ought to highly esteem the public they exist to serve, in fact, see them as a dumb mass whose minds are pliable and gullible enough to accept the vilest and most shameless propaganda. Did we not all feel that way, at some time, especially at the height of the land reform programme when those monotonous jingles with over-zealous ‘farmers’ kept informing us that our land was our prosperity? Somehow I never quite felt so prosperous, what with empty shop shelves, horrendous food shortages and currency nose-dives plunging me into early depression. Who actually believed any of that when the reality of suffering was all around us to see?

Everywhere, perhaps more so in Africa, journalists strive for recognition as professionals whose choices are informed by sound codes of conduct and ethics grounded in humaneness and morality. Therefore, those media practitioners who choose to continue to play to the tune of the piper (that is, the political leader), even when the refrain has become cacophonous and a strain to the listeners’ ears, deserve some retribution for the gross misuse of the power they possess. For what difference is there in the venomous ink of a pen and the speech of a once-trusted leader now filled with lies and deceit?

A prominent human rights lawyer brutalised by security agents a few years ago put it beautifully: it is like asking a snake to have dinner with a frog. He was giving his thoughts on the swearing in of Morgan Tsvangirai as Prime Minister in front of an unsmiling Robert Mugabe. Deadpan or just uncaring. You could almost hear him: “Let’s just get it over with. I have other things to do.”

That is how this whole thing is being viewed by many who have had to watch the country being messed up by the increasingly senile Founding Father even in the face of all odds being staked against him. In the streets you could feel it, in the pubs and commuter omnibuses you could hear it: no joy that finally one of our own is in government to take us to the Promised Land.

While thousands thronged the stadium to hear the Prime Minister speak after his swearing in, many who stayed home cursed. Mugabe rules! The refrain was loud enough even as the people walked about aimlessly, wishing they were in another land where they had jobs and able to feed their families.

That people have lost all interest in contemporary politics is a reality all too palpable. The folks talk about how they have been reduced to scavengers; the very scavengers as described a few years ago by the very man who today stands as Prime Minister. When he said it back then, he inevitably invited the acerbic tongue of the Founding Father and his doctors of spin. Even when that valiant Catholic prelate from Bulawayo Pius Ncube and the then executive mayor of the city Ndabeni Ncube reported people in the city were dying of hunger, the Founding Father was apoplectic. These people were in league with the Devil, never mind that the snake as used in Biblical symbolism is the Devil himself.

It is this and other things that has people cursing: why have this charade of a unity government with a snake? And this is not that snake in the grass that strikes while you are busy minding your own business.

People die of hunger and cholera and one man and his cohorts claim it is a silent genocide being perpetrated by imperialists. No one understands why this GNU thing had to happen. Politics as usual perhaps?

When Nkomo entered into that pact with the devil, his story was that he wanted to stop the violence, the killings, and the politics of hate that existed back then. Today however, I hear some people say what reason did the MDC have for joining the Zanu PF in government?

Some analysts say it was pressure from the toothless SADC leaders. Then if that holds true, the people here have every reason to say they were never part of this negotiated settlement in the first place. It was all African politics as usual that excludes the interests of the ordinary man, woman and child.

If an opposition political party can be pressured to enter into a coalition government with a losing party, then as logic would have it, the losing party can also well be pressured to leave power gracefully. Unless of course the losing party still controls the state apparatus of power and threatens civil strife if it is not given political space in the proposed government. They said it before anyway, them who claim to have fought the 70s bush war, that they are ready to take up arms and return to the bush and reverse any electoral outcome that favours the opposition.

We have heard it all before, a ruling party loses an election and it claims the winning opposition rigged the poll. What crap! But then Zimbabwe is just full of crap.

You just have to hear the people talk. No optimism whatsoever. Misery with a capital “M”.

Just this month alone, I know whole families who left the country for South Africa and these families have no clue what they will do once they get to the so-called “place of gold.” But their stories are from the same abject universe: “we need to send our children to school.”

A journalist working for a government-controlled daily also left for South Africa, never mind that he had no passport. He just had to leave, and according to him, he has no clue what he will do once he gets there. I recalled a cynic years ago who quipped, “I don’t know where am going, but I believe I’m in the right direction.”

And imagine all these people are fleeing just when a “new” government has been formed, so one has to imagine that this GNU ought to give people hope for a new beginning but then no one wants to stick around to find out how it pans out. What then? Turns out only the politicians know.

Last year I was asked to contribute to a study on how information communication technologies (ICTs) are used in the civil society sector in Zimbabwe. One of the questions I was asked was what Kubatana would do if the Mugabe regime disabled our email and internet communications. My response went something like . . . we’ll make sure to get back up and running. And that you can’t keep a good project down!

Last week it wasn’t the Mugabe regime that interrupted our internet communications, it was the US based company Bluehost. We’ve used Bluehost for the last few years to host our blog, we’ve promoted their services on our main web site Kubatana.net because their service has been good, and we also encouraged organisations like Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) and Island Hospice to use Bluehost.

Unfortunately these two organisations were also brought down by Bluehost.

Bluehost’s communications with us say that they have had to take this action because it is illegal to do business with Zimbabwe due to sanctions applied by the US Government.

Indeed it is true that the US has imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe, but these sanctions are specific and targeted. And Kubatana, WOZA and Island Hospice are not not the list of sanctioned organisations or individuals.

Bluehost has chosen NOT to champion freedom of expression, nor have they afforded us, a fairly long standing customer, any respect by investigating the issue more deeply.

Matt Heaton, the CEO of Bluehost, wrote to us saying that he was particularly irate that members of the Kubatana community and other supporters of freedom of speech like Ethan Zuckerman and his readership, had “spammed” the Bluehost abuse and legal department.

This is where, and when, I feel immensely proud and warmed by our supporters taking the time to lodge legitimate complaints with Bluehost. It’s not spam Matt.

In the meantime we’ve had blogs backing up but with the help of Ethan, and an introduction to Rimu Hosting, and of course, Kubatana’s resident stellar-techno-kick-arse Brenda, we’re on stream again. So will WOZA and Island Hospice be soon.

Very many thanks to everyone who has supported us in this issue. Here I share with you one of our favourite emails sent to Bluehost by a Kubatana subscriber:

I find it incomprehensible that you have taken the decision to no longer host the Kubatana blog.  Are you unable to discern the difference between the tyranny and oppression of a despotic regime and a small group of people who tirelessly and in the face of adversity use the medium of the Kubatana blog to disseminate credible, relevant and important information to the outside world? It beggars belief that you find a blog, which works towards FREEDOM OF SPEECH in a country hamstrung by some of the most repressive media legislation in the world, worth sanctioning! Zimbabweans have to deal with enough!  They need your assistance to disseminate information.  The so called targeted sanctions should be exactly that – TARGETED!  Use your common sense!  Kubatana is part of the change Zimbabwe needs. Show the US’s reputation in the rest of the world is NOT justified.  Take five minutes to look at this issue.  It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that Kubatana should NOT be sanctioned! Support democracy! Yes YOU can!

Jestina Mukoko has been in police custody for two months. On Wednesday, High Court Justice Chitakunye denied her bail ostensibly because she “had yet to be advised by a court on her charges.”

Now, I don’t have any legal training, but this struck me as patently absurd. And surely illegal. Rule of law? What rule of law.

So I asked a lawyer friend for his thoughts, and for his sense of whether the Justice had any legal backing for his decision. He referenced the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act, and helped to interpret it a bit:

117 Entitlement to bail

(1) Subject to this section and section 32, a person who is in custody in respect of an offence shall be entitled to be released on bail at any time after he or she has appeared in court on a charge and before sentence is imposed, unless the court finds that it is in the interests of justice that he or she should be detained in custody.

Now the crucial words here are “at any time” and “on a charge”. The words on a charge are generally accepted here to mean not that a formal charge has been put (as the judges seemed to hold) but on allegations of having committed an offence or reasonable suspicion thereof. If, however, the person is held without there being a suspicion or allegations of having committed and offence then it is correct to state that the person cannot apply for bail. . . . The judge should order the person’s release without bail as the detention is then unlawful in terms of the Constitution, the name for the court action being the interdictum de homine libero exhibendo, more popularly known as habeas corpus in Anglo jurisdictions.

The judge presumably claimed ignorance of the meaning of “on a charge” in relation to bail applications but more importantly over looked the provisions of 117.

117A Application for bail, bail proceedings and record thereof

(1) Subject to the proviso to section 116, an accused person may at any time apply verbally or in writing to the judge or magistrate before whom he or she is appearing to be admitted to bail immediately or may make such application in writing to a judge or magistrate.

Note this section does not mention on a charge. Furthermore the section is ambiguous. It is not clear whether the phrase “before whom he or she is appearing” applies to the phrase “application in writing to a judge or magistrate”. If it does not – and my opinion is that it does not – then a detained person can make an application for bail “at any time” even before he or she has appeared in court, let alone whether any formal charge has been put.

Also aside from the technicalities of the law common sense tells even a lay person that the state cannot scupper any bail application by the simple expedient of not putting formal charges to an accused. When an accused appears in court, the state has to tell the court why the accused is there . . . this counts as appearing on a charge. Often charges are complicated and it takes some time to draw up the formal charge . . . usually only put to an accused when the trial starts.

The whole point of having time limits within which a person must be taken to court is so that a judge can speedily consider the lawfulness of the arrest and determine the question of bail so that the innocent are not held a second longer in custody than is necessary. The approach of the judge overlooks this fundamental principal of our criminal procedure.

All bail issues should be deal with as a matter of extreme expedition. I understand from another lawyer that although the courts hear applications for habeas corpus as a matter of urgency, when the police ignore these orders the subsequent complaint for contempt of court is not. This makes a mockery of the entire system.

If the MDC is planning to extradite Mengistu Haile Mariam, the former Ethiopian dictator, I wonder if they’ll help get Jestina Mukoko out of illegal detention in Zimbabwe?

I’m trying to imagine the following conversation actually taking place between a pair of passion-struck lovebirds: “Honey, guess what I got you for Valentine’s Day?” the man says with a dreamy gaze into his lover’s eyes. “What?” she gasps in excitement. “Tell me!” “The best present ever,” he continues. “I got you …more quality time!” At this point, the young woman is probably imagining that her man is going to whip out a velvet box containing a Swiss, diamond-crusted gold watch, coupled with the biggest bunch of red roses ever seen.

Ha! Dream on, sister. This man actually does mean more time – as in, his gift to you for the year is more time spent together in loving bliss. More time, and less money, spent.

When a friend of mine suggested this as the most romantic gift he could offer his girlfriend, I almost fell off my seat laughing at the thought of the repercussions.

“That’s the stuff of instant break-ups,” I warned him.

But somewhere in his questionable logic, my friend actually believes that he can successfully pull off his plan and get away with showing up doe-eyed and empty-handed on the one day of the year specifically set aside for love and romance.

Now, I know that women generally have a bad name as petty, opportunistic parasites that often thrive on the financial infirmities of males. Put simply, women are often perceived as being gold-diggers, mining the wealth out of men for their own gain. But I think even those among us, who don’t consider ourselves as such, would draw the line at a man’s attempt to pass off an abstract construct like time as a gift on an important day.

To me, that reeks of cheapness and laziness. Yes, this is Zimbabwe. And yes, times are rough (though I am always startled by how many of my fellow citizens move around clutching serious wads of American dollars in their wallets and purses). But even Cupid – the hopeless little romantic that he is – would wing his way all the way here just to angle and shoot one of his arrows into the behind of such a man.

Shame on him, I say for thinking that his suggestion even constitutes a feasible gift idea. A gift for a special day needs to be something that can perceived through the senses, something she can shake about in its wrapped box, trying to guess its contents; something she can excitedly catch a whiff of, like perfume or a well-cooked meal; something palpable.

Besides, we Zimbabweans live in curious times. We suffer much and sacrifice even more -dreams, memories and even hopes. If there is any group of people whom I expect out on the streets, painting the town red with passionate and compassionate love this February 14, it is us. For when all else has ravaged us – political intimidation, economic deflation, scourges of violence and disease and condemnation – all that has remained to console us is love.

And whether you are a traditionalist who believes that V-Day is a commercial gimmick, or a fervent but cash-strapped romantic, I say to you, “Make the effort, this year!”

Pluck a simple flower from an overgrown bush, be patriotic and buy a packet of Zimbabwe-manufactured toffee sweets, or make a simple card with a meaningful message. Whatever it may be, make sure you do something special for someone you love. Our recent history has taught us to value what we have now because we have learned in a cruel way that the future is often not for us to control.

And like I told my friend, I endorse once more, “Time is a precious gift which your loved ones will greatly appreciate. Give it to them throughout the year, but on this special day, give them something more. Give them something they can move around showing off with pride at your love for them. A cheap gold-plated chain that will rust in a few weeks time will do, if that is really all you can afford. It is the moment, the day, the joy of being celebrated that matters.”