The Government of National Unity should stop talking and start acting.

The unity government has the power to remove Aippa, license new broadcasters, reform the ZBC and Zimpapers to make them relevant to the needs of the people. These are the reforms that people are looking for. – Rashweat Mukundu, Programme Specialist: Media Monitoring and Research Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa) Regional Secretariat

The Media Alliance of Zimbabwe (MAZ) has just withdrawn from the highly controversial Zimbabwe All Stakeholders Media Conference set to start tomorrow. They cite the re-detention of Zimbabwean activists as the reason for their withdrawal.

We need more of this. Much much more. Without this kind of public condemnation of the behaviour of the Government of National Unity (GNU) there will be no hope of achieving a return to the rule of law and respect for human rights.

I hope that others involved in the conference will follow the example set by MAZ and stand up for justice.

Shame on ANY of you who don’t.

05 May 2009.

Media Alliance of Zimbabwe Position Statement on the Re-Detention of Journalists and Human Rights Defenders.

The Media Alliance of Zimbabwe advises members of the Zimbabwean public, the Ministry of Media, Information and Publicity, and Members of Parliament of its decision not to attend the Zimbabwe All Stakeholders Media Conference scheduled for this week from the  6th to the 9th of May 2008 in Kariba. This decision was made following the re-arrest and detention of human rights defenders, in particular Zimbabwe Peace Project director Ms. Jestina Mukoko and freelance journalist Mr. Andrisson Manyere on charges that can only be considered political.  It is MAZ’s view that their re-detention represents an apparent abuse of the judicial process which undermines the spirit and letter of the Global Political Agreement, especially as regards the restoration of a political environment that is democratic and respectful of the rule of law, as well as cognisant of the urgency of ensuring the security and freedom of human rights defenders and citizens in general.

It is in this context that MAZ considers it impossible to participate at the government All Stakeholders Media Conference when human rights defenders and journalists such as Ms. Mukoko and Mr.Manyere, who are presumed innocent until proven guilty, continue to be targets of repression.

MAZ remains committed to engaging the government to ensure that genuine media law and policy reforms are made in a politically conducive environment, and according to the letter and spirit of the GPA.

Ends//

MAZ comprises of MISA-Zimbabwe Chapter, Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe National Editors Forum, Voluntary Media Council of Zimbabwe, and African Community Publishing and Development Trust.

The topic is rather vague.  I take it to mean, for the purposes of this discussion, not spiritual crisis or domestic crisis or epistemological crisis, but economic crisis brought about by the politics of cronyism and patronage.  Anybody with a sense of history can see that power corrupts so that today’s oppressed will become tomorrow’s oppressors.  Davids are Goliaths in waiting.  I believe it is my duty as a published writer to keep detached from this ugly cycle so that I can snipe at it.

Sniping is an appropriate figure of speech for writers because they attack from a distance, not like performance artists – actors, playwrights, poet-musicians, film-makers, who engage in hand-to-hand combat and who are, consequently, living a lot more dangerously.  It was his plays in Kikuyu, not his novels in English, that got Ngugi imprisoned.

It’s not only my genre that makes me feel a little safer in our police state.  Unless you’re a commercial farmer, being white still carries a few advantages in this country.  For example, you’re less likely to be searched at a road block.   And unlike Olympic swimmers and Wimbledon tennis players, serious white writers in Zimbabwe have, until recently, been dismissed as irrelevant.  While I used to find that hurtful, I also found it curiously comforting.  I believe my phone is tapped, and I have had some threatening calls, and my laptop was ‘disappeared’ by a senior police officer; but I have yet to see the inside of a prison, and my bones are still intact.

I said earlier that writers attack from a distance.  They work at home or at the town library.  They are seldom asked to read in public because the public find their readings boring.  They are physically detached from their books.  But I have created an even greater distance by the use of satire, a form of sniping which allows me to be disingenuous, to hide behind my irony.  However, this sometimes backfires.  For example, readers think I write sonnets and odes and sestinas because I am colonial-minded, but I write them to parody colonialism.  I reject for mine what Coetzee said about Pringle’s verse: “The familiar trot of iambic tetrameter couplets reassuringly domesticates the foreign content”

The artist is notoriously egotistical, a persistent self-promoter – crisis or no crisis.  The artist would do well to heed the almost daily heroics, in Zimbabwe, of vegetable vendors, certain bloggers, certain journalists, certain human rights activists, and those who wait outside jails.

They say art thrives in times of crisis.  Where then were the artists during Gukurahundi?  Were they still too intoxicated by the euphoria of Independence to take notice?  Where today have all the writers gone? – some into exile, some into silence, some into self-censorship, some into commercial farming!

I was pleased to see the Media Alliance of Zimbabwe and the Voluntary Media Council of Zimbabwe speak out about an upcoming All Stakeholder Media Conference being organised by the Ministry of Media, Information and Publicity.

The conference is themed “towards an open, tolerant, and responsible media environment.” Its objective is “to review Zimbabwe’s current media environment and policies in order to guide the Government’s media policy.” It replaces an event planned for March which Deputy Minister of Media, Information and Publicity Jameson Timba called “the first consultative step by the ministry as it reviews Zimbabwe’s media environment and policies with a view to advising the inclusive government on its new policy.”

But the substance of the two events seems quite different. As MAZ and VMCZ point out, many of the speakers in the revised programme are the same people who have blocked media freedom and opposed liberalisation of publishing and broadcasting over the past ten years.

The 15-minute presentation on “Being seen to be free and fair: Media and electioneering” is hosted by Sekeramayi, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Web 2.0 publishing gets 15 dedicated minutes – under the topic “New media and accountability: The role of ghost sites and blogs.” Way to be progressive, interim government.

How are the same people who closed off Zimbabwe’s media environment, and made it characterised by intolerance, irresponsibility and propaganda going to be the ones to open it up and make it more tolerant and responsible?