In a major test, Zimbabwe paper ready to try again
HARARE, Zimbabwe - The newspaper consists of a small office with one authentically untidy desk and one bare but for a borrowed laptop. A couple of chairs. Newspapers and papers stacked on the floor. And Boss Barns.
That would be Barnabas Thondhlana, one of Zimbabwe's best-known newspapermen. He sits at the messy desk, explaining the vague order in the various piles. The big one is job applications, hundreds of them. The ones he doesn't like (including those of four former state spies) get thrown onto the floor. The ones he does like go into several piles on the desk and floor.
Boss Barns, as he's fondly known to his colleagues and drinking pals at the Quill Club, was there on the day in 2003 when armed police shut down the country's last independent daily, the Daily News.
Now the affable 47-year-old is about to launch a new independent daily, NewsDay. It's the first major test of media freedom under Zimbabwe's new government of national unity, which was set up in a political compromise after President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party lost elections last year but refused to give up power.
No launch date has been set for NewsDay. The big question mark is whether the Ministry of Media, Information and Publicity, controlled by hard-line Mugabe loyalists, will give the paper a license to operate.
Trevor Ncube, NewsDay backer and owner of the Zimbabwe Independent, a weekly, and South Africa's Mail and Guardian, said he had spoken to government ministers from all sides: "And I haven't received a single indication that there's somebody who doesn't want us to be licensed," he said in an interview at his Johannesburg office.
His aim is to produce a paper trusted not only by ZANU-PF but by its erstwhile partner in the unity government, the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC.
"We need a newspaper that says it's OK to disagree," said Ncube, who describes himself as an idealist.
The Daily News was the first big independent daily in Zimbabwe, where state-controlled and subsidized media such as the Herald voiced the ruling party line. With the slogan "Telling It Like It Is," cheeky cartoons and reports investigating corruption and abuses, the Daily News saw its circulation soar to more than 100,000.
Thondhlana was news editor of the Daily News when it launched in 1999 - the same year the MDC was formed by Morgan Tsvangirai, now the prime minister, and others. Thondhlana later became editor of the Sunday Daily News.
"The vision was to give the population news that was not being covered by the state media. We didn't think it was dangerous," Thondhlana said.
But after ZANU-PF was nearly defeated in 2000 elections, it cracked down.
The paper's editor, Geoff Nyarota, was riding in the elevator with a stranger one morning around that time. The man confessed that he'd been sent to kill Nyarota, but couldn't bring himself to do it, Thondhlana said.
In 2001, a large bomb destroyed the paper's printing press. Later that year, a shop beneath the editor's office was blown up. In 2002, the paper's office in the city of Bulawayo was gas-bombed. Nyarota was arrested twice, and numerous other Daily News journalists were arrested and charged. "Some people [at the paper] were saying, 'Look, we can't put our lives on the block for a newspaper. Maybe we should leave some of the issues we covered and go more social,' " Thondhlana said. But the paper stuck to its guns.
